Help on External HDD

[Sir Topham Hatt]

So, I bought a WD 1TB drive a few months ago. It has been working fine since I bought it working with my WDTV device to watch movies on my TV.

However, I come home today, connect it up to the PC and Windows 7 tells me it needs formatting. I try using different plugs and sockets but the same result. Tried plugging it back in to the WDTV media player which doesn't detect it at all. Device manager reports no problems ("this evice is working properly")

This might be a software request really but is there anything I can do? I have a fair bit of data on there which I don't really want to loose.

Thanks

[Roger H. Veteran]

Weird, i've had that happen to thumb drives but never to external HDDs. Trying it on various systems to see if you can get it to work, DOS, XP, Vista, 7, Mac OS X.

If not then you might be stuck with formatting the drive, LOW LEVEL ONLY and then doing a recovery on it. Low level only removes the "Table Of Contents" but the data is still there which the recovery program will find and rewrite the table of contents.

NOTE -Just make sure after you format you don't write ANY data to the drive without first doing the recovery.

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Low level format, is that just a "quick format" ?

I only have Windows 7, but have accepted I may have lost the data. What program would you recommend for a recovery?

[TokiToki]

If not then you might be stuck with formatting the drive, LOW LEVEL ONLY and then doing a recovery on it. Low level only removes the "Table Of Contents" but the data is still there which the recovery program will find and rewrite the table of contents.

Yikes! Low Level Formatting in today's times means Zero filling every sector! What he means is High Level Format = Quick Format. Quick Formatting only removes the TOC.

[Madoshi]

yea i think he got those two mixed up

quick format is high level

low level formatting is basically zeroing out the drive