[wheelieman_r1]

I use XP and have an older Western Digital 500 Gig hard drive that has about 50 gigs of files backed up on it. It's been unplugged and stored for awhile. I recently plugged it back into my computer. The following message was displayed: "The disk in drive E is not formatted. Do you want to format it now? Yes or No" From there I hit yes, and this message came up: "Warning formatting will erase ALL data on this disk. To format disk, click OK. To quit, click cancel." I clicked cancel. I do not want to loose all my data. Is it possible to access the stored information? If so, how? I went to the Western Digital website and could not resolve my problem. I further tried to plug the external hard drive into a laptop with XP and got the same result. I would greatly appreciate any help or thoughts on how to overcome this problem. Thanks!

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Hi wheelieman_r1

I further tried to plug the external hard drive

Can you provide some more details about the HDD as in what is the model name or series number.

[phillpower2]

Hi wheelieman_r1

I further tried to plug the external hard drive

Can you provide some more details about the HDD as in what is the model name or series number.

[wheelieman_r1]

The model is WD5000C032 and the serial number is WCAPW0660819.

[phillpower2]

I`m not sure data recovery software is the answer here because of the "Warning formatting will erase ALL data on this disk. To format disk, click OK. To quit, click cancel." message occurring on a 2nd computer, it is however worth trying 1st, some software options @ http://www.snapfiles...tarecovery.HTML try Recuva 1st as it has a good success rate.
If the recovery software does not work then I suggest you remove the actual HDD from the case and either place it in an external USB HDD enclosure or into a second PC as a slave/2nd drive, you can find some info on how to remove the HDD from the case @ http://www.ransacker...ecover-data.htm
Good luck and let us know how it goes or if we can assist with any of the above.