External Hard Drive "needs to be formatted" when I've been using it, am I fucked ??
 

I've got a 250-gig Western Digital "My Book" hard drive and it worked fine for the last year and a half, but now when I go to fire it up, it shows the drive, but not how big it is, and when I click on it, it wants to format the drive. The drive fires up and runs like normal, I can hear it spinning around, so it doesn't seem broken. I used the WD tools, but it says everything checks out fine.

I had some of the data backed up from the drive, but not all of it. Is that data pretty much fucked ?? or is there a way to get it. I guess I should've been a little more on top of it, but when you have a backup hard drive, you don't expect it to shit out on ya. I guess once this ordeal is over, I'll have to buy a second one and have a backup of a backup.

Ive lost a ton of work on a "mybook"....now I always have a backup of a backup.

You don't back up the backup, you back up your data twice. :thumbsup

Are you competent with PC hardware? Try removing it from the case and installing it directly into your PC, then running WD Diagnostics again. Such tools can not always fully test drives connected via USB.

We have had great success recovering files with File Scavenger 3 here in my office.

Wow, thanks for the kickass program !! It works beautifully, it found all my files, so now I'm golden :) I appreciate the info.

Yeah rowan, good idea. What I just did was ordered a 500-gig internal hard drive, so I'll pop that in my system and then reformat the external drive and then when I go to back up something, I'll back it up on both the extra internal and external drive :)

I guess I should also go back to the good ole cd burning, but I hate that, it's nice just having a drive that you can dump in files and it's golden rather than having to burn every so often, but then again, if it'll save me headaches, I probably should do that to.