The hard drive disappears and asks to be formatted. The system asks you to format the flash drive: what should you do to prevent the data on the drive from being lost? Causes of problems with a removable disk

It happens that the computer does not open the external hard drive. Despite this, the device is quite successfully recognized by the system. In this case, an error appears like: “To extract files, formatting is required.” It is clear that if you follow the proposed procedure, you will no longer be able to obtain the contents, since as a result of formatting, all data is safely destroyed. What to do in this case?

How to open an external hard drive without formatting

Option 1

Open the Disk Management folder and view the status of the device you need. Most likely, it will be described as follows: “type: primary, file system: RAW, good.” This means that the file system has been corrupted in some way, which is where the problem with reading data lies.
System recovery programs will help correct the situation. Acronis Disc Director or RawRecovery, one of the internal Easy Recovery plugins, will do.
Install the selected program on your computer and enable scanning of the damaged device.
Run file system recovery.
After the manipulations have been carried out, the content will be available for viewing and other actions.

Option 2

This method helps if the device is detected, it is possible to safely remove it, but it is not displayed in Explorer. This method will help if the problem is caused by missing partitions on the hard drive. Everything is corrected by creating partitions; for this, a standard Windows tool is used:

Click the "Start" button and select the "Computer" tab from the main menu, then "Management".
From the drop-down menu that appears, click on the Disk Management tab. A window will open in which the status of the hard drives is described: under the designation “Disk 0” the built-in hard drive is hidden, and under “Disk 1” is the external one. Opposite the latter you will see the inscription “Not distributed”.
Right-click on the label and a menu will appear, the first line of which will be the command “Create a simple volume...”. Choose this command.
The Simple Volume Wizard window appears. From this point on, you need to follow the instructions of the system, or, more simply, click the “Next” button.
After completing the wizard, the data you need will immediately appear in the “Explorer” folder.

What to do to prevent the problem from recurring

The easiest way to avoid data corruption on your hard drive is to properly remove the device from your computer. How it's done:

After the files are finally downloaded to the device's memory, find the icon for the USB connection of the external hard drive to the computer.
Hover your cursor over it and right-click.
From the context menu that appears, select “Safely Remove Hardware.”
Wait for the system to respond, after which you can disconnect the connection cable.

This simple rule is ignored by many users, and as a result they have to deal with data corruption.

You may also find it useful to read our article.

Checking via the command line

Using the Run system utility, launch the command line. Enter cmd in the line and click OK.

A hard drive that is faulty should be connected to the computer, but not formatted. Look at the letter that was assigned to it (you can do this in the Start menu). On the command line, enter chkdsk e: /f. Click on Enter and start the analysis.

It may be that the process does not start, then you should launch the command line as an administrator. Find it in the Start menu and open the context menu. Next, click on “Run as administrator”, and then you need to repeat the command.

When the check is completed, all data that was faulty will again function normally, and you can work with the hard drive again (write data to it and view files).

Disk formatting

A hard drive that fails must be disconnected and then reconnected. A small error window should appear on your screen. Click on “Format disk” and wait for the process to complete.

It may be that the error message does not appear, then go to “My Computer”. Right-click on the removable device and select “Format”.

There can be many reasons for this (incorrect shutdown, startup, wear, etc.), but the most common is errors on the disk. Out of ten similar problems, in 9 cases a standard disk error check helped. The disk error checking program is built into Windows and the command for it is Chkdsk. Let's take a closer look at it. If something is unclear, there is a video instruction at the end of the article.

Calling the command: best from the command line, i.e. Start in the find field, write CMD and press Enter. CMD is needed.

At the command line you need to enter the following: let’s say you need to check drive J: (be sure to look at which letter the faulty hard drive is), then the command will look like this:

CHKDSK space J: space /f ( chkdsk j: /f) then press Enter. Next, the system itself will check the hard drive for errors and automatically correct them. Patience, a couple of Our Fathers and our disk with important information will start automatically.

This is how you can easily save and restore important information on your own on an external hard drive that won’t open. After such cases, I recommend duplicating this information on another external medium. If suddenly your data has been restored, but not everything will help you, the article about. You can’t do anything this way, let’s go to extreme measures and

An external hard drive is more vulnerable than a permanent storage device. It is constantly moved from place to place, exposed to environmental influences, risks of falling and incorrect connection. Therefore, it fails noticeably more often. If the next time you connect to a computer, the operating system cannot detect it, this may indicate damage to its file system. Let's look at how to restore external media without formatting.

Causes of problems with a removable disk

The file system is damaged.
The device has encountered a software failure.
The removable hard drive has been exposed to a virus.
The device was not properly disconnected from the computer.
Careless handling of the drive, mechanical damage.

Is it possible to restore a portable hard drive yourself without formatting? In most cases, unless the device was damaged mechanically, the data on it can be recovered. To do this, we will consider 2 methods.

Recovering media using Windows

The external hard drive is checked for errors. To do this, launch the utility, which is included in Windows. To run it, you need to enter the “cmd” command on the command line. After confirming the command, a console appears on the monitor, where the line “chkdsk h: /f” is written, in which “h” is the letter of your removable drive.

If, when you try to check, the computer displays a message stating that it is impossible to carry out the check at the moment, then you need to agree to the offer to check the selected disk the next time you reboot the system.

You can choose another way to check the disk for errors, which is more visual and accessible. To do this, follow these steps:

In most cases, after scanning, the hard drive will completely restore its structure without formatting. After the treatment is completed, it will start on its own, and all data will be visible on the monitor.

Recovering an external drive using R-Studio

You can restore external media without formatting. This utility works with all known file systems, recovers information from deleted and damaged partitions, and works with encrypted files.

After starting the program, all drives will be displayed in its window.

All media connected to the computer will be visible on the left side. Media recovery is performed in the following order:

By selecting an external hard drive from this list, you can look at information about this media. It will be displayed in the right window.
When you click on the “Scan” button, the program will scan the selected media and display information in the form of colored clusters.
When you hover the cursor over a cluster, all information about it will be displayed on the right side of the window. The duration of the scan depends on the storage capacity. In some cases it can take tens of minutes.
At the end of the check, a window similar to the following will appear:
We need to go to the “EXTRA FOUND FILES” subsection. A list of found files will appear.
Now the found files can be restored. To do this, we need to put tags next to the files that we need.
Press the “RECOVER” button. If you decide to restore all found files, you can immediately use the “RECOVER ALL” button.
After confirming your choice, you need to decide where to save the recovered files.

Since they take up so much space, a decent capacity hard drive is required. If there is a shortage of free space on the media, only part of the information can be restored. The recovery operation begins when such a window appears.

Today we will look at:

An external hard drive is a very popular and useful device these days. It is thanks to it that you can store large amounts of data, which you can then use in any other device that has a USB drive. In general, an external HDD is a large flash drive with impressive capacity, which is very similar in its characteristics to any other hard internal HDD of a computer.

However, along with the fact that this is, in fact, a hard drive, and not a full-fledged flash drive, there are problems associated with hard drives, one of which, in particular, is the problem when the system cannot access to an external hard drive and asks to format it. Let's figure out together how to get rid of this error.

Why did this problem occur?

An error when the contents of an external HDD cannot be opened, and the disk itself requires formatting, provided that there are no physical defects, is always associated with the file system.

A file system is a method of organizing information on any storage medium (be it a flash drive or hard drive). Today, the most commonly used and most efficient file system is NTFS. It allows you to store files of 4 GB or larger in size, and also has an improved data security system compared to its direct competitor, the FAT32 file system (however, the second has better performance and consumes less RAM).

It is the absence of a file system on the media that can lead to the system insisting on formatting the hard drive where this problem is detected. Typically, this is indicated by the following information in the hard drive properties: instead of the NTFS or FAT32 file system, you can find RAW.

The RAW value means that there is simply no file system on the external hard drive.

Solving the problem with opening the contents of the disk

The Windows operating system provides for various situations related to hardware and software errors and allows you to easily and quickly fix them:

Important! This tool can only fix minor problems. In this case, there is a possibility that some data will be lost.

The second, more effective way is to completely format the external hard drive, as the system asks when you try to open it. However, the pitfall here is that all information on the external drive will be completely deleted in any case. However, this will “heal” the disk and it will work normally.

We hope this material helped you deal with the problem when the external HDD does not open. For any questions regarding this topic, please contact us in the comments for further assistance. Thank you for your attention!