My Western Digital External Harddrive suddenly needs to be re-formatted and I already have 100gs of data on it. It says if I format it will erase all the data. I don't want to lose it. How do I get my computer to recognize it?

Copy the data to another disk.

I can’t access it. In properties it says it is empty and it in RAW?? It was NTFS.. I don’t understand why it’s suddenly changed. :(

Meyhinks your data is gone, sadly…

Use a linux boot disk to recover the disk. here

Yeah if that doesnt work, go to someone who works on computers, this is not an uncommon problem and sometimes they are successful in recovering the data.

This is not a good sign at all. I hope you have a backup of your data. Still, take it in to a computer expert (not Best Buy, they couldn’t expert their way out of a paper bag), just make sure to tell them not to format it! They may be able to fix it, they may have seen this problem before, sometimes it’s just an issue with Windows recognizing the hard drive properly. Or, you can try to go with the linux boot disc route before bringing your computer in.

Could it be that you need to find a driver for it? I know that’s usually not the case with externals, but you never know.

I don’t know… It was fine when I took it in to get scanned for viruses and when they gave it back to me it is suddenly in raw format and needs to be formatted. I don’t understand the linux disc thing… I have some cds I can burn it on but I have over 100 gs on the external to recover…will all of that fit on the linux thing??

1) Burn this on a CD: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
2) Insert in it on the CDROM and reboot your computer. You computer should boot into Linux (Ubuntu).
3) Insert the External Harddrive
4) Pray to god that it gets recognized so that you will be able to back it up…

I burned the cd, and I put it in and restarted my computer..nothing happened…and it says that it won’t open it unless it can find the program that created it.

Try selecting the properites of the drive, security tab, and you may notice that no one owns the drive. Allocate yourself, or everyone, as the owner and you will be able to see the drive and its data once again.