Please Help! Is this drive corrupt?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have a WB 3TB external harddrive.  For some unknown reason Windows 7 will no longer  let me access the drive until I format it.  I get an error "_ You need to format the disk drive F: before you can use it." _  It says: _ “F:\ is not accessible.  The volume does not contain a recognized file system.  Please make sure that all the required system drivers are loaded and the volume is not corrupt.”  _  My problem is I have been using the drive for several weeks and have data on this drive.  Any ideas how to fix this?  Please help.

Thanks,

Anthony

2

Sounds like a data corruption problem, try using a data recovery program like test disk and then format the HDD to use it again.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk