One day when I was transferring files from computer to my USB drive (Lacie 200GB), the computer encountered some errors and I rebooted. Then, when I clicked on the USB drive a pop-up appeared asking me to reformat. I don't want to reformat because I need the data on the drive. Can someone help me to solve this difficulty? Thanks!!!
do a scandisk with the boxes to fix errors checked. This will usually fix the problem. If that doesn't fix it you can use the free "testdisk", it has the capability of recovering a damage partition. Someone recently had the same problem and was able to get his hard drive working again with testdisk. All your data is safe, and is 100 percent recoverable. Since you got the warning that the drive needs to be formatted it means that the drive is still good. Worst case scenario, testdisk has a addon called "photorec" that can recover data from a corrupted hard drive.
Hi, Thanks for your advice. I tried scandisk, but it won't let me scan anything. Tried testdisk, scanned the partitions, and the structures are OK. Any other alternative?
Hi, Basically you need to allow 'TestDisk' to write the partition structure to disk. Here is a TestDisk Step By Step guide.
If scandisk isn't working, you can also try doing a chkdsk x: /f (the x = drive letter of external). Do this from the command prompt (run box). I would try to get a scandisk or chkdsk done first (easy fix) before going to testdisk.
Hi, Can someone help me with using Testdisk? I'm following the direction from here. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step The first partition is listed twice which points to a corrupted partition or an invalid partition table entry. After the Quick Search of cylinder, instead of giving me this screen http://www.cgsecurity.org/mw/images/First_results.gif with the green parts, my results just says "structure OK". I don't know where to go from here? Because it doesn't lead me to "Write to save the partition structure". So confused!
