How do I retrieve files from a drive that says it needs to be formatted?

September 25, 2004 1:17 PM

External Hard drive will not open, cpu informs me that it needs to be formatted. Need some assistance please. (MI)

My friend is a wedding photographer and has a Simpletech External Hard drive.

When he tries to access the images stored on the drive. He is prompted that it needs to be formatted.

How can he access the files without having to format and lose all his pictures.

posted by chiababe to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

First questions: Is it a PC running Windows? Linux? A Macintosh?
posted by majick at 2:46 PM on September 25, 2004

Response by poster: This is a system running Windows XP. Sorry I did not include this.
posted by chiababe at 3:52 PM on September 25, 2004

First things first, I'd make sure everything is hooked up ok inside and outside the external bay and that the drivers are not messed up for the drive.

If that fails, this has a demo copy so you can see if the drive can be accessed. I had an internal drive crash with the same format message and used this software to recover my files. Note that it will grab a lot of things that were also recently deleted. You will also need some free space on a seperate drive in which to save the recovered files.
posted by Sangre Azul at 4:28 PM on September 25, 2004

He could also try taking the drive to another machine and seeing if it works that way--a friend's house or a kinko's or something. Then he could burn all the info from that drive onto cds or something.
posted by amberglow at 4:36 PM on September 25, 2004