Quick Navigation: • • • • • • • External hard drive is very useful when you want to copy large files between computers, or your important files like photos, videos, documents and other data. They typically have large capacities and can be connected to computer via USB sport or FireWire. External hard drives enjoy different forms, such as SSD, USB flash drive, Sony pen drive and so on, and vary a lot in their capacities from gigabytes to terabyteHowever, you may see external USB hard drive not formatted error, saying you need to format the disk before you can use it; considering there are important files on the hard drive, you feel uneasy. My Seagate External Hard Drive Shows Not Formatted 'So I have a Seagate 3TB External Hard Drive that all of a sudden tells me it needs to be formatted.

• Follow the steps in the Updater window to download and install the latest updates. Intuit print and pdf repair tool. We'll start by updating the Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. Most printing problems in QuickBooks can be resolved by updating Adobe Acrobat/Reader to the latest version or by repairing Adobe. To update automatically from the product: • Launch Adobe Reader or Acrobat. If you're still unable to print, open one of the QuickBooks sample company files and try to print the same type of form or report. • Choose Help, and then Check for Updates.

Click the Partition button in Disk Utility's main window. By default, Mac OS X will use the GUID partition table to format the drive.

I have 2.8 TB of files, pictures, videos and more on that drive with no backups of it anywhere. So basically, when it is plugged in, every 10 seconds or so it disappears and then reappears with this pop-up message: ' You need to format the disk in drive G: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?' Obviously I don't want to format it as that means I lose all my data' Phenomena: After you have plugged your external HD into a computer, you can’t open it to access the files because the Windows pops up an error message which reads “ You need to format disk in drive before you can use it” OR “ The disk in drive X is not formatted” (appear in Windows XP). It seems that such kind of data loss problem happens every day in our daily life. In fact, not formatted error not only happens on external hard drive, but also appears on almost all storage devices such as HDD,, USB flash drive, pen drive, memory card and so on. When not formatted error happens on those devices, Disk management displays their file systems as RAW and users are unable to access the drive in Windows.

Facing such situation, what should you do? Are you going to format the hard drive as you are told? Next, we will tell you more about external hard drive needs formatting. Why My External Hard Drive Keeps Asking Me to Format It Before we go to the solutions, we would like to show you the reasons that may lead to this error.

In this way, you can avoid the improper operations to your external hard drive OR prevent the terrible things from happening. Below are the possible factors for external hard drive not formatted: • File system is not recognized by Windows.

For instance, file system is Ext 2/3/4. • The external hard drive suffers from sudden power outage when it is used to transfer files or something else; • The external hard drive is improperly pulled out or forced to pull out; • The external hard drive gets virus attack; • There are bad sectors in the external hard drive. • External Hard Drive Needs Formatting? When running into external hard drive not formatted error, most users have such misunderstanding: they think they have to take Windows' suggestion and have to format the hard drive without other solutions. Because in their minds, only when they can open the external hard drive, they are able to access files stored on the drive.

It is true that formatting may enable you to regain the access to the external hard drive, but have you ever think about the consequence once you have formatted the external hard drive? Yes you will find no files on the drive after formatting. Therefore, for those who have no backups, keep this point in mind: DO NOT FORMAT your external hard drive before you take out the data in it. Formatting is a bad idea if the drive is failing, and that procedure means you will lost the file structure (folders, organization, file names). As a matter of fact, the data in the external hard drive may get recovered as long as they are not overwritten. So remember the more changes you have made, the less chances you have for data recovery.

So how to fix the external hard drive not formatted error and recover data on the hard drive? Well, you need to use the software without altering the data on the drive or get it to someone who can help you out technically. And this article will show you what to do step-by-step.