"This drive is not formatted..."

D

damocci

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Hi guys,

Once again I have PC issues (such is my life *sigh*).

I have a 250GB external hard drive, and up until the other day it worked like a charm. I switched off my PC one night, then the next day when I turned it on and tried to access the ext HDD, I got that message: "This drive is not formatted. Would you like to format it?" Hell no! I don't wanna format it; there's 230GB of data on it and most of it is irreplaceable.

I have not installed any new programs, I always "Safely Remove" when I wanna power down the drive, I have AVG antivirus, CA Internet Security, the works. In short, I'm not a novice so this problem happened out of the blue, on its own. I don't think System Restore would work, would it?

Is there anyway of recovering the drive as it was before this message started appearing? I'm not a computer genius, but I'm thinking that my file table (whatever thing it is that tells Windows were on a drive are stored) is somehow faulty. Isn't there a way to "transplant" a new one so I can at least see my files, back them up and THEN format the drive?

Data Recovery experts are an option, but they cost an arm and a leg (and I really would like to keep my arm and leg). I have used a program called "Recover My Files" before when this same problem happened with my other drive over a year ago, and I had to leave my PC on for days, but it only recovered about 50% of my files.

There HAS to be a way around this so I can recover EVERYTHING that was on the drive. Please can anyone give some suggestions? Also, please can someone advise me how this problem occurred out of the blue so I can look out for warning signs in case it decides to happen again?

PC STATS:
Penium IV 3.0 GHZ
1GB RAM
Windows XP Pro
20GB primary; 160GB slave; 250GB external
 
I think Hiren's Boot CD might have the tools you need to restore the lost partition (I believe something similar happened a while ago and was fixed by using this). Finding a copy is a mission, though... :p
 
Don't write anything to that drive until you have your data back and don't format it.

Last time I had that error message I used GetDataBack to save all the files except 1 file. It's not free, but the trial version can recover files individually and you'll at least be able to see what is recoverable. Takes a long time though because it goes over everything byte-by-byte. I'd say 10 hours+ for a 250gb drive.
 
Thanks guys. Just to be sure, I'd need to transfer the recovered data onto a separate drive before being able to make use of it, right? By that, I mean I need to store it somewhere else, then format the external hard drive, before transfering it back, right? Because if that's the case I'll need to ask one or two of my friends if I can borrow on of their drives.
 
Oh another thing, what causes this to happen? This must be the third time I've experienced it. First time I was naive, gave up and just started from scratch. Second I had enough data to to put up a fight. This time I'm taking no prisoners and I want every single byte of data back. Is there anything in particular that triggers this? I'm thinking Eskom's load shedding might have something to do with it, but I can't be sure.
 
first thing I would do is run the drive out of its case, also have a look for any damaged ICs on its board, esp one with Smooth written on it - the drive should have a mirror of the FAT
 
bwana said:
Try SpinRite. http://www.grc.com/srrecovery.htm
Click to expand...

3rded!
I used spinrite to recover some *extremely* valuable data and it was goo to go.

My suggestion tho before you start any recovery procedures of any sort is to remove that drive from the housing, put it in your pc and try read it.
If that fails then I personally would not try any form of revocery without a backup of the drive, for that you need another 250GB drive and some cloning software, ghost or seagate discwizzard should work just fine.
Once you have cloned the drive then try and do a recovery from there.

If the data really is valuable to you then you NEVER try to recovery the data without a clone of the drive first.
 
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