My external hard drive shows not formatted, but it has all my data.
Everyone Leo Notenboom here
for Askleo.com, this, as it turns out,
is something that does happen from time to time and there are some steps you need
to take carefully to avoid losing the data on that drive
first, before you do anything, don't format the drive.
One of the recommendations that comes up from Windows is to say, hey,
this drive is empty. Would you like me to format it for you?
No, absolutely not.
If you know or believe that there should be data on that drive,
formatting will erase the data or at least make it significantly harder to get back.
Do not format the drive if you think there's data on it.
Step number one is to try another machine.
This is probably about half the time successful.
The issue is. There's just something either about the drive, the connections,
the whatever, that if you take that drive showing is unformatted on one machine,
you plug it into another one and everything's still there.
Great.
Make sure the data is backed up and you're good to go.
You can decide later whether or not it's the the machine needs work or something
else, but you've at least got access to your data again, if that didn't help.
So the machine, the drive shows up as
unformatted on both machines that you've tried it on.
Then it starts to get a little bit more difficult.
The next thing I would do
in that situation is to verify the external enclosure.
By that I mean an external hard drive is
really nothing more than an internal hard drive that's been placed in a box.
Sometimes that box, which has a little bit of circuitry in it, is defective.
It just fails for various reasons.
The thing to try, of course, is to get another box.
They're available on Amazon.
You can get a replacement box
for that specific size drive, plug it in and see if it suddenly starts to work.
There are even adapters specifically
for this kind of scenario that don't have a box at all.
They're just connectors that connect directly to hard drives
at one end with a USB connection at the other.
Regardless, the box is the next thing.
I would try the cable also, by the way, I failed to mention that before,
but the cable, the USB cable, it's not it's not common for it to be
the problem, but because it is so simple to replace, it's the one of the things
that I would have you do anyway, just because it's so easy to do.
If on another enclosure
or another connector,
the hard drive still shows up as
unformatted, then we're starting to get worried
that there's something wrong with the drive itself.
The thing that I would try next in these cases is to run a data recovery tool.
I tend to use tools like Recova from Piriform the people that make Ccleaner.
There's another tool called get data back.
I've not used it directly.
It's not free.
But the free trial should tell you if it can find anything.
Both of these tools claim to be able
to identify and recover data from drives that have been formatted.
Now, I'm skeptical because there are types
of formatting that will completely overwrite the data.
But nonetheless, there are scenarios where I could see them working.
And depending on exactly what's happened
to your drive, they're absolutely worth a try.
They are what I would do next.
Finally,
the real last resort, of course, is to find and use a data recovery service.
These are the kinds of folks that will
take the drive into a clean room and, you know, do some kind of diagnostic
on it, doing whatever it takes to pull the data off.
I'll warn you, those aren't cheap.
Now, again, all of this would be moot if
you had a backup of the data on that drive,
if you're worried about data loss because a single drive is going to fail,
then by definition you haven't backed up.
What's on that drive
if you've only got the data in one place?
This is exactly what you're risking.
You are risking losing that data every time you use the device that it's on.
So my recommendation, my very strong recommendation is that you
make sure whatever happens to this scenario with this disk,
you make sure to learn from it and start backing up your data.
Now, if there's only one copy of the data,
if that data is in only one place, it's not backed up.
And this is the kind of catastrophe you're risking.
For related articles for comments,
for updates and more, visit askleo.com/5001,
i'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.