Hard disk crashed

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

When I connect My Passport Essential 320 GB hard disk to my PC, Windows (7) says that my hard disk isn’t formatted and I need to format it to be able to work on it. I looked around and have realised that this is probably due to some bad sector(s) on the disk.

Please tell me the cause and remedy to thid problem.

Thank you! 

2

Format it?

I don’t think it’s the sectors, since formatting is not enough to fix them. Sounds more like plain data and/or file system corruption.

3

So what do you suggest that I do?

4

Run a file systemr repair software like TestDisk first, or Recuva or PhotoRec for file data recovery if the file system can’t be fixed, then format it.