Maximum PC

I don't know what led to this, but when I plug in my external HDD to access the data, it keeps displaying the same error message: "You need to format disk in drive H: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?" I don't want to lose the data, how can I access it without formatting? Thank you in advance for helping.

TestDisk might be able to rebuild the partition so you can access it.

My guess would be that you pulled the drive prior to a write being completed. Select the safely disconnect drive from PC and select the ext. drive. Then, power down the external device by disconnecting from its power and from the PC. Power down PC. Replug power back into both power and PC and turn on. Boot up PC. See if it fixed itself.

First I like TestDisk and LatiosXT is the one who brought it to my and others attention on another thread. There is a good bet it will work.

Before that though I would do a sector by sector backup. A sector by sector backup requires a empty formatted drive or partition at least as big as the drive being backed up and will take hours to backup.

I would also try another USB (assume) cable if you have one, and port hub.

Alternatively you could first see what Recuva sees. If it can't see anything, I'd try Testdisk.

If it fails, you can try a paid recovery service (free to check if it can see your stuff) like NTFS Recovery or GetDataBack for NTFS.

1. Powering down, restarting all doesn't work, have tried it with 3 different PCs.

2. Tried Recuva, but it can't access the drive. I guess like Windows it suggests the disk be formatted first.

3. TestDisk comes up with a baffling error.

"The harddisk seems too small!

4. How do I know if the disk was/is NTFS or FAT? Disk Management says it's Raw???

BTW, external drive is not encrypted and there is only one partition.


EDIT: UPDATE

Ah, because it thinks the partition is a FAT16, which has a maximum space of 2GB. If I recall correctly, aren't you supposed to set which file system you think the drive is to recreate?

How do I set the file system?

Here's what I did, I followed these instructions:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Create
Proceed
Intel
Analyse
Quick Search

There is no option to set file system, if I do a search for partition, it will only search for fat file formats, which will produce the "disk too small error", so I am trying something else. Under "file utils" it seems to detect the ntfs boot sector, it says the boot sector is bad, so maybe I should try rebuilding it?

The last few sections, especially the deep search, looks more promising.

Sorry, I haven't used test disk in a while. I have used it before to recover a NTFS partition gone RAW.

The deep search (actually labelled "deeper search") can only be performed after QuickSearch is finished. After QuickSearch, I get the "disk too small" error, that means the "deeper search" option does not appear. Seems like I only have one option left: rebuild boot sector. I wonder if rebuilding boot sector is similar to formatting? Should I or should I not rebuild boot sector?

Okay, I managed to change file type to NTFS, but then I couldn't rebuild boot sector, so I went back to quick search, and finally figure out how to use the deeper search function, only to get can't read FAT boot sector error.

Have you tried to take the drive out of the case and hook it up direct to your motherboard? This should eliminate any hardware enclosure errors.

Nasty