Am I Doomed?

[lostchris08]

I recently hooked up my external hard drive. The computer recognizes it and when I double click on the drive. It asks me to format. Now, I already have music files loaded onto my external hard drive. Is there any hope to recover these files before I format the drive or is the data already gone?!?!

Thanks in advance!

 

[Vampiric Rouge]

There is a chance that you are not doomed just yet. I would try going to the manufacturers website for the external drive and see if they have any software tools. Also you could try to boot in to a live CD (like knoppix) and see if you can't get any thing. If it really means that much you could try and find a data recovery program to get some of your information back after you format it.

 

[Geoff]

Most of the time it will say that if there are corrupt files or the file system is corrupt. Your best bet is to run the Windows check disk utility on that drive to fix any errors. If the drive is badly corrupt, you will have to go through the command line in order to fix them.