Omnimaga

General Discussion => Technology and Development => Other => Topic started by: nizamgph on May 15, 2014, 05:39:26 am

Title: Hard Drive Problem
Post by: nizamgph on May 15, 2014, 05:39:26 am

I have a 500GB external Hard Drive. I never had any problem until recently, I started seeing a message saying "you need to format this drive before you can use it". I couldn't access the data inside it. What can I do now? Should I format the hard drive? What happen to my data if I format this?

Title: Re: Hard Drive Problem
Post by: Streetwalrus on May 15, 2014, 05:42:36 am

This is a good read, partition recovery section :
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-data-recovery.html

Title: Re: Hard Drive Problem
Post by: Keoni29 on May 15, 2014, 04:38:14 pm

Whatever you do: DONT format it until you recover your data! If you format the drive you will lose all data that might still be on there.
Also check which filesystem is on there. Windows does not like ext4 for example.

Title: Re: Hard Drive Problem
Post by: Streetwalrus on May 15, 2014, 04:43:31 pm

By the way I fixed my mom's thumbdrive with the method in the link I posted. It was probably just a corrupted partition table, maybe a bit more. But there was no data loss afaict. Also, what Keoni said.

Title: Re: Hard Drive Problem
Post by: Sorunome on May 15, 2014, 04:44:51 pm

Also you can still recover data off of a un-partitioned HDD :P