How to deal with External Hard Drive Not Formatted Error?

External Hard Dive Not Formatted Error Case

"Recently, I ran into a problem accessing my Seagate 160 GB External Hard Drive. Every time when I turn it on, Windows prompts that my external hard drive is not formatted and asks me if I want to format it. It's really annoying! How can I deal with this problem without losing my data?"

This question is frequently asked by many people in the forum and here I really cannot control myself to post some ways to deal with external hard drive not formatted error. Hope it is helpful!

Why External Hard Drive Not Formatted Error Pops Out

Before discussing how to solve external hard drive not formatted error, let's talk about why this problem pops up. Here is the explanation: Every floppy and hard disk needs to be formatted to prepare the media for use with a particular file system. In this case, this error usually happens when your disk hasn't been prepared for use with your OS or it has been damaged and the data can no longer be read.

Guide to Fix External Hard Drive Not Formatted Error

When encountered this error, first you can try to plug it into a different USB port or plug it into another computer. Sometimes it works. Otherwise, you can copy your data to computer and then format the drive. It is the easiest and fastest solution. If you have already accidentally formatted your external hard drive with out backup, and many important files were formatted, what should you do to rescue them. Under this scenario, you can ask for help from H-Data Recovery Master professional:

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Steps to recover files with H-Data Recovery Master professional version 

Step 1. Launch H-Data Recovery Master and select the file types you want to recover from the external hard drive. Then click "Next" button to move to the next step.

Step 2. Select the external hard drive where you lost your data and click "Scan" button, the software will quickly scan the selected disk to find all your target files.

Step 3. After scan, you can preview all the listed recoverable files one by one and select out those you want. Then, click "Recover" button to get them back once. Here you should save all the recovered files on another disk to avoid data overwriting.

Follow the above guide step by step, you can backup all your data on the inaccessible drive. Then you can format it without the risk of losing your important data. By the way, the guide can be also applied to find and retrieve formatted data.

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