I don’t know what led to this, but when I plug in my external HDD (WD Elements 640GB) to access the data, it keeps displaying the same error message: “You need to format disk in drive H: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?”
Windows Disk Management sees the filesystem as Raw, and I don’t know whether it was previously NTFS or FAT or whatever. I’ve been using it for 2 years with no problems when this popped up. The disk is not encrypted and there is no software running on the disk. It’s a very basic plug-and-play thing. And there’s only 1 partition, as per default setting. How can I access my data?
It sounds like something is corrupt. If it was formatted FAT32 the largest file you could have would be 4 G. Maybe something like TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk or EaseUS Partition Recovery http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/ will fix things. Sometimes running the command to convert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS will also fix a bad partition. If you want to try that as a last ditch effort post back and I’ll find the link.
I am trying TestDisk, but I am not sure how to use it. I keep getting the “disk too small” error which seems like it’'s probably seeing the disk as FAT even though it’s NTFS. But then, why would it obtain this error in the first place? Because it thinks that the disk is NTFS but it’s scanning for FAT. Yes, the program is smart enough to know that it’s confused and what does it do about it? Get confused!
