When I plugged in my Seagate 160 GB external HD today, the power light on the enclosure began to blink on and off. The computer detected the drive, but when I tried to view data on the disk, an error message appeared saying "The disk in drive E: is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?"

No information appears on the left-hand column when I click on Drive E:, and thus, it has become apparent that the data has become corrupt or unreadable for some reason of which I am unaware. Clearly I would not necessarily enjoy losing all of the data on my hard drive, so I need to find some way to either recover or repair these files to their previous state.

Does anybody have an ideas as to how I might be able to do so?

Thanks,

TheQuij

(Woops, I guess my topic name was too long.)

This post has been edited by TheQuij: Sep 29 2007, 10:15 PM

hi, welcome to geekstogo, two questions then, does the same thing happen when you try the drive on another computer, and can one still see the data under a liveCD like knoppix linux, thanks

This post has been edited by fleamailman: Sep 29 2007, 11:19 PM

Thanks for the response!

After checking with another computer, the hard drive still appears to be unreadable. I do not use any sort of Live CD.

Thanks

can you try running chkdsk on that drive?

press start , then run, then type "chkdsk E: /r /f" (without the quotes) and press the ok button...report any errors

I was unable to even start the Check Disk Utility. Running caused an error to occur and the program to close. Do you want me to send the error report?

yes if you can

I am unaware of how to save an error report as a text file. Is the attached file a suitable report?

Thanks

This post has been edited by TheQuij: Oct 12 2007, 03:27 PM

I had this happen to me on a SDcard and also on a external Drive.

This can sometimes happen if the drive is not safely removed from the computer.

Admin made a good post back in 2004 of some programs that might help you get your data back. Some of these links may or may not work due to the post was made back in 2004.

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/File-Recovery-t386.html

Thank you very much!

Just wondering what tool did you use, And how well did it work?

PC Inspector is definitely capable of recovering the files. My only question is: where should I put them? My computer's HD has a capacity 40 GB, so I can't very well store all of them on there. Also, do you think the external HD will still be usable? Is there any way I could recover and save the data back onto the same external hard drive so that it may become readable again?

Essentially, can I still use my old external HD, or do I need to buy a new one?

This post has been edited by TheQuij: Oct 12 2007, 10:30 PM

TheQuij,

Yes I think your Hard Drive is still usable however its partitioning table is probably messed up so it will need to be repartitioned(by formating it). One of those tools listed on the link I gave you may be able to fix that without formating. However I would still put your data somewhere else just in case. Data recovery is not a 100% guaranteed process. You can put them on something like a CD or another external Hard drive if you have one.