Why is my computer asking me to format a disk ?
Asked by
Scarlett (
915
)
February 2nd, 2011
So I plugged in my external hard drive to my computer, but when I tried to open it to see my pictures and music, the computer wouldn’t let me.
It told me that I would have to format the disk before i could use it, and I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to lose my files or pictures.
Does anyone know how I can see and copy my files, without formatting it ? I’m scared if I do it will erase everything and I don’t want that to happen.
It used to work a few months ago, I didn’t have a problem with opening the hard drive. The only thing I can come up with is I have too many files on it. But I’m not sure what gives.
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3 Answers
This has happened to me once or twice. What I found to work was to turn everything off then restart windows and see if it recognises the disk.
My Western Digital hard drive does this all the time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I use Windows 7 and the drive was originally bought for Vista I don’t know if that is the issue but it is annoying.
Most likely the drive isn’t formatted in the NTFS format if you’re looking at it through Windows. Do NOT format it or you WILL lose all of your data. The best thing to do is take it to a computer where it actually works… copy over all of the data to a separate drive, format the problematic drive to NTFS if you’re using Windows (XP, Vista, 7) (unless you’re going to be using it on a MAC too… then you might want to use Fat32 or VFAT*) and then copy all of the original data back over to the drive. Most drives come with retarded bloatware installed when you first purchase them and create all kinds of issues like this. It’s best to wipe them (and repartition if you need to) when you first purchase them to avoid these problems. Hope this helps ya. If you need any specific help you can usually hit me up in real-time via twitter @torchingigloos
*Fat32/VFAT work with most computing formats (Mac, Linux, Windows) but only support file sizes of less than 4gb so as long as your files are small this should work fine. If you have DVD ISO’s or some large archive files though… you’ll want to go NTFS (which works with Windows XP, Vista, 7 and most Linux distros… Mac is another issue).
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