Have you ever encountered such problem that external hard drive says needs to be formatted? For example, we may see such prompt that disk is not formatted or you need to format the disk in drive O before you can use it information when try to open the external hard disk drive to view its original data or store new contents on it, and then we would be asked that do you want to format it now. Generally speaking, it is better not to format the unformatted external drive at once, because we can try to retrieve files from it at first.
You need to format the disk in drive G before you can use it. Do you want to format it now? I did not know why the external hard drive says needs to be formatted if I need to access information saved on it at the previous time. I was told so last night, and I had no idea what should be done at that time. The reason I did not know whether format the external USB drive or not is that there are some contents important stored on the problematic drive originally. How can I view them again? -Lu from Utah
It is true that we can try to get the original contents back from the external hard disk drive when it says need to be formatted before we can use it normally, and the tool we need to use is data recovery software. What's more, it is easy and simple to perform the unformatted external drive recovery. Here are the steps as follows:
Recover data from external hard drive
We can format the problematic external hard disk drive after the raw external USB drive files recovery under the help of data recovery tool. After the format, we can save new contents or remove the retrieved files to the portable hard disk drive which is normal to use. It may be a terrible case for some of us to be asked to format the external drive though we can solve such problem at last. As a matter of fact, besides external hard drive not formatted error, there are some other problems we may meet when using the external disk drive. And here are some of them below:
1. The external hard drive can not be recognized by computer. One of the other problems we may encounter during the process of using the portable hard drive is the unrecognizable case. For instance, there is nothing we can see when open the external hard drive after connecting it to the computer though we have stored contents on it at the old time. Do not worry if we happen to meet that problem, because we can ask data recovery program for help to restore those previous files, too.
2. The portable hard disk drive is infected by virus. One of the common data loss problems which may trouble us is the virus infection case. There would be various results of virus attacks we may view, but the same point of those results is the data loss trouble. It means that we would lose data saved on the external hard disk previously after the virus infection. Fortunately, we can try to get them back with data restoration tool.
3. The external USB drive is damaged physically. We may damage the portable hard disk drive physically in daily life if we are careless. For example, the external hard drive would fall and be divided into two or more parts if we place it in a dangerous place, or other potable situations. It is hard for us to retrieve the original information form the portable hard drive if it is damaged physically,
4. Other problems we may encounter when use the portable hard disk drive.
One more thing we need to know is that we can perform data recovery on the unformatted external hard drive no matter which brand it is, such as WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and so on.