Argh.
I need a bit of help here guys.
Earlier today, I took my External Hard Drive out of it’s USB slot and put it onto someone else’s PC to install something for them, And later on, I put it back into my PC.
But now it’s telling me to Format the Drive in order to use it, But it is formatted and has all my stuff on it.
Is there anything to get it back to normal?
Thanks guys.
There may be a way, but from my past experience with iPods and USB drives, a format is what I ended up doing. You may need to do that but don’t fret, if you need to do that just take it back to his computer, copy everything over and write to CDs. Then format your HD while plugged into your computer, put in the CDs and rewrite it to your HD. Time consuming but if needed, is worth it rather then losing all your work and other items on it.
Call the company to confirm other solutions as well. I’m just informing you of my route I took.
Thing is, it won’t be read by any other computer… D:
Thanks though,
Hopefully, if there aren’t any solutions that can fix this, when I take it to a shop tomorrow, hopefully it can be fixed.
Does any error message come up, or is it just a dialogue box asking you if you want to format it?
Could it be driver related?
Try plugging it in and then restarting your computer?
Probably screwed up ejecting it or something.
So how to fix that? 
Tried all of the above.
I’m now trying to restore the partition using Testdisk. If that doesn’t work… ¬.¬
Good Luck! 
Strangely, many people have been having this problem. And it’s only lately that they’ve been having them. I’m thinking a windows update may be to blame. I also had the same problem not long ago. First time it had ever happened to me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a fix for you 
Is it W7 you’re using? That happened to a flash drive of mine. Formatted it with the W7RC, and it doesn’t work under any other computer now, only this one.
Yeah, I am, but I’ve used W7 for quite a while now. 
I always recommend using Spinrite from grc.com to repair magnetic HDDs (as opposed to solid-state). That software has been around about as long as HDDs so if anything can recover your data, it can. The only step up from this is the several-thousand-dollar-pricetag forensic recovery places, most of which run Spinrite first anyway…
It’s not free, but it’s worth every penny, and running it in maintenance mode a few times a year prevents these sort of issues too.
This same thing happened with me and a thumb-drive. I used it on my laptop a few times, it always able to reconnect to my desktop afterwords, and then once, it just stopped being able to be read, coming up as “needs to be formatted”. It still worked on my laptop, so I just threw all the data onto my laptop and reformatted the damned thing. I lost the user interface and vault program onboard, but now it’s a fine bare-bones storage device. Kinda sucked though. No idea what caused it… Oh, one was Windows 7 and the other XP.
Hey bro I know this sucks but here’s what you have to do.
1.Remove the drive from the enclosure, be careful as you could break the enclosure as it is not always designed to be opened.
2.Plug the drive to your PC via SATA or IDE (depends on the hard disk, I’m almost sure it will be sata, though) And it should read your files correctly at that point, if it doesn’t, go to step 3.
3.Get ahold of a registered copy of GetDataBack (fat32+ntfs) and backup your files manually from the drive, then you can put it back in the usb case.
note: if you open the drive and find out it’s a zif slot, you’re out of luck unless you find a compatible adapter.
Also sometimes it works via USB but I don’t recommend it as many of my files were corrupted when I tried it with 2 different external drives.
Thanks for your suggestion sersoft,
I have used another program though, Called Recuva, which found my files.
Now, I just need somewhere to put them.
Okay, that’s good to hear.
Loss of data really sucks sometimes.
Yeah, you’re right there.
I felt for 2 seconds like I’d lost everything. :FFFUUU:
Hopefully, For now, I can recover what I need.
There goes 200GB of films and porn.
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