Anytime I attempt to access my external hard drive, it says "The disk in Drive K is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" Is there anyway I can get around formating it? I dont understand why its telling me to.
For one reason or another, XP isn't recognizing the existing format.
Has anything in your machine or drive changed since the last time you successfully accessed it? Have you traveled with the external, or otherwise had a situation in which it may have been damaged? Please post some specifics about your machine and the external.
well I have a basic question, Is there anyway I can get the data? The only thing I can think of would be to do a quick format and then use some kind of software to recover the data. The problem is that I dont want to format and lose my data, which I know should fix the problem with not being able to access it.
If you've got data recovery tools, don't bother with a format - it almost certainly won't help anything. They should be able to access the drive without an existing format. I'd give Norton Ghost a shot, if you've got access to it.
Is it an actual external drive, or is it in an enclosure? If it's in an enclosure, take the drive out, put it in your PC, and see if it can read the data ok. If it's not, see if you can run chkdsk on it.
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