# Half-full Hard Drive suddenly says it needs to be formatted... Help!



## DarkSkies (Nov 30, 2007)

I have multiple hard drives on my Win 7 PC and today I noticed that my 2-TB Drive E had no information next to it. When I clicked on it, it said it needed to be formatted. 

I tried the few tools I had at my disposal but could not get past Win 7 reporting that the drive needed to be formatted.

Does anyone know of any good tools for diagnosing what happened, or for recovering files from it? 

I found some tools at C-NET, but the tools won't run when I leave Drive E connected (I tried internal SATA/power cable connection plus external USB enclosure), so I either have a serious problem or need a much better diagnostic/recovery tool!

Any recommendations are welcome...

Thanks.


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## davring (Jan 13, 2007)

System restore, go back 24 hours.


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## DarkSkies (Nov 30, 2007)

davring said:


> System restore, go back 24 hours.


I thought that only worked for operating system files and installed programs, to go back to an earlier restore point...

Edit: And it does not affect personal files. I'll need some kind of tool that can detect the files written to the drive, even if the file partition table thinks the drive is empty.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/System-Restore-frequently-asked-questions

Note

System Restore does not affect personal files, such as e-mail, documents, or photos, so it cannot help you restore a deleted file. If you have backups of your files, you can restore the files from a backup.


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## davring (Jan 13, 2007)

I thought it may be a hiccup in the OS, it won't hurt to try.


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## The Merg (Jun 24, 2007)

Try EASEUS Partition Recovery. I have had good success with it in restoring lost data from "formatted" drives. The one thing you might need to do, although it sounds a little counter-productive, is to format the drive first and then run the program.

If you perform a Quick Format on the drive, you are not truely erasing the data on the drive, just the pointers to all the data. Before formatting though, try the program as I have had it recover data when I got that message you are getting.

- Merg


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## DarkSkies (Nov 30, 2007)

Thanks. I will try this.


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## DarkSkies (Nov 30, 2007)

Well, miracle of miracles, I came home after work ready to install the recovery tool and check out the drive, and was surprised to find that all files were back!

As I mentioned earlier, I had even swapped the drive from the SATA cable to an external USB enclosure while trying to troubleshoot, and I left the PC on overnight with the drive still in the USB enclosure. My PC is now showing the full contents of the drive, and I can't figure out why. 

I of course immediately started backing up files from this drive, and as soon as that's done will do a full disk scan, but I really want to know why it failed in the first place, and how it recovered. Can a drive that the PC thought was new and needed to be formatted, suddenly recover its own file partition table? 

I'm in shock still ...


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## SeaBeagle (May 7, 2006)

"DarkSkies" said:


> Well, miracle of miracles, I came home after work ready to install the recovery tool and check out the drive, and was surprised to find that all files were back!
> 
> As I mentioned earlier, I had even swapped the drive from the SATA cable to an external USB enclosure while trying to troubleshoot, and I left the PC on overnight with the drive still in the USB enclosure. My PC is now showing the full contents of the drive, and I can't figure out why.
> 
> ...


This a different animal but, I have a external hard drive on my computer that stores all of my applications. The only thing on my main drive is the operating Windows XP. Anyway one day the hard drive was not located by the computer the drive was also hooked to the computer and powered up. Then somehow the o outer was able to locate the external drive. I have no idea what happened but glad the drive is located.


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