i recently purchased a new pc running windows vista, i bought an external hard drive bay for my old hard drive which has all my music and movies, etc. when i first installed it it picked it up no problem but now when i start it up it says i need to format the drive meaning i'll lose all my data. is there any way round this ?
It sounds like it can't read the hard drive, which suggests a hardware fault. The only thing I can suggest is to try putting the drive that's in your external enclosure inside the PC and reading it from there. If you still get the same problem, you'll probably have to replace the drive.
thanks for the reply, my new pc motherboard only has sata options and this is an ide drive so looks like i may be up s**t creek. just dont understand why it read the drive in the 1st place and now wont recognise it at all.
Generally, software issues with hard drives don't tend to happen "all of a sudden". What you can try is buying another enclosure for it and trying that. A lot of external hard drive enclosures aren't exactly top quality items, so don't place infinite trust in them. Needless to say, they're far cheaper to replace than a large hard drive.
