Guide to Fix External Hard Drive Needs Formatting in Windows

My External Hard Drive Says It Needs to Be Formatted

An external hard drive is very useful when you want to copy large files between computers or back up your important files like photos, videos, documents, and other data. They typically have large capacities from gigabytes to terabytes and can be connected to a computer via a USB port or FireWire…However, in the Windows operating system, you may encounter an external hard drive not formatted error.

Phenomena: After you have plugged your external hard drive into a computer, you can’t open it to access the files because Windows pops up an error message that reads “You need to format the disk in drive before you can use it” OR “The disk in drive is not formatted (appears in Windows XP)”.

In fact, the not formatted error not only happens on an external hard drive but also appears on almost all storage devices such as hard disk drives, USB flash drives, pen drives, floppy disks, memory cards, memory sticks, and so on. Facing such a situation, what should you do? Are you going to format the hard drive as you are told?

Please don’t be anxious when running into such a situation, for we know how to fix external hard drive need formatting issue as well as the way to recover data from formatted hard drive. Next, we will tell you more about this error message.

You might also be interested in 10 Situations Where External Hard Drive not Showing up & Solutions.

Why My External Hard Drive Needs to Be Formatted

Possible Reasons:

First and foremost, we would like to show you the reasons that may lead to this error. In this way, you can avoid improper operations on your external hard drive or prevent terrible things from happening in the coming days. Below are the possible reasons:

• The external hard drive suffers from sudden power outages when it is used to transfer files or something else;
• The external hard drive is improperly pulled out or forced to pull out instead of safely removed from the PC;
• The external hard drive gets virus attacked and the file system gets corrupted;
• There are bad sectors on the external hard drive.
• More for discovering…

Misunderstanding of External Hard Drive Needs Formatting Error:

When encountering that an external hard drive needs to be formatted, 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.

The reality? It is true that formatting enables you to regain access to the external hard drive, but have you ever thought about the consequences once you have formatted the external hard drive? Yes, you will find no files on the drive after formatting.

Therefore, keep this in mind: DO NOT format your external hard drive before you take out data rescue. Formatting should be the last resolution because you will lose the file structure (folders, organization, file names…) Taking all these into account, we put forward the following solutions.

3 Solutions to External Hard Drive Needs Formatting

Solutions here are deeply related to whether you have made a full backup of your external hard drive. If you have made one, then congratulations! You can go ahead formatting the external hard drive and then copy the data back. But if you have not made a piece of backup, you’d better go ahead reading the following content. What should you do to recover data from hard drive keeps asking for formatting?

#1. Try the Easy Things First

1) Connect it to another USB port or another operating system to see if you can read the files.
2) Take your chance to restart your computer and see if God opens another door for you.
3) Run anti-virus software to check and kill possible viruses on the external hard drive.

These may seem meaningless but sometimes they do help people get out of trouble. If no miracle happens, try the second solution.

#2. Check Your Hard Drive for Errors

1) Press the Win + R keys to call out the Run box.
2) Type cmd into the blank and hit the Enter key.
3) Type CHKDSK K:/f (if your external hard drive is Drive o:) into the Command Prompt window, you can replace the letter “O” if your external hard drive is not “O”.
4) Press the Enter key and it will start repairing damaged files and you will see some of your filenames before it finally asks if you want to save lost chains to another location. Type Y just in case.

CHKDSK usually takes some time to fix the error, so please be patient. If CHKDSK can run this process normally, your external hard drive may become normal as before. Then you can try again accessing your external hard drive after restarting your computer.

However, if you are unable to go through this process, and encounter the following message: the type of the file system is RAW, CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives, what should you do?

Any other tips on how to restore files from not formatted external hard drive?

#3. Recover Data Before You Format External Hard Drive

As a matter of fact, the data in the external hard drive may get recovered as long as they are not overwritten. Remember that the more changes you have made, the fewer chances you have for data recovery. Here you have two options to recover data from not formatted hard drive.

1. Send the external hard drive to a professional data recovery center to get off data technically. This will usually cost you a sum of money.
2. Try professional free data recovery software by yourself before you pay a penny.

If you choose option 1, jump to the second move – format external hard drive.
If you choose option 2, keep reading from here.

First Move: recover files from not formatted hard drive

How to recover data from a not formatted drive? Well, you need to use data recovery software without altering the data on the drive. You can download MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free which is an excellent program that brings easy file recovery to Windows users. With five data recovery modules, you can easily recover the mainstream file types on audio, video, image, email, etc.

5 data recovery scenarios:

1. Undelete recovery: recover deleted files even if you have emptied the Recycle Bin.
2. Lost partition recovery: recover files from lost/deleted partitions. For example, it helps to recover data lost by diskpart clean.
3. Damaged partition recovery: recover files from formatted hard drive, damaged hard drive, and RAW drive.
4. Digital Media Recovery: recover files from digital media like flash drives, memory sticks, memory cards, etc.
5. CD/DVD Recovery: recover files from formatted/scratched CD/DVD.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery works great on all Windows operating systems. Click the button below to get one piece of the free edition.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Now follow these steps to carry out the data recovery process from a not formatted external hard drive:

Step 1. Connect the problematic external hard drive to your computer and launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery. Now, you can select a partition which you want to recover data from. If you need to retrieve data from the whole external hard drive, change to the Devices tab and select the target drive to scan.

Step 2. When the scanning process is finished, the software displays files according to their file paths in a tree structure. To quickly find the wanted files, you can make use of the Filter and Search features to filter out unnecessary files.  Alternatively, change to the Type tab to find files by their file types and file formats.

Step 3. Instead of saving files directly, you can preview the chosen file to verify the file content. The Preview feature supports previewing documents, pictures, videos, audio, and other files. Afterward, choose the files you need and click Save to choose a new destination for those files.

The free version only offers 1GB of data restoration. If you have selected a number of files larger than 1GB to recover, you will come across the following window saying you have reached the limit for the selected files. In this case, you need to update to an advanced edition to break the limitation.

Second Move: format external hard drive

Now it is time for you to format the external hard drive to regain access. Here you can make use of the Disk Management utility or MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition. Their difference is the latter one offers more file systems and is more flexible in formatting. For example, you can format a hard drive larger than 32GB to FAT32 with this partition manager.

>>Format Using MiniTool Partition Wizard Free

Download and install MiniTool Partition Wizard Free on your PC. Then follow the guide below:

MiniTool Partition Wizard FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 1. Make sure your external hard drive is well connected, then launch this free partition manager to get the main interface.

Step 2. Find the target partition and right-click on it. You need to select Format from the context menu, then set the Partition Label and File System in the prompt window. Click OK to save your settings.

Step 3. Click Apply at the bottom left corner to complete the suspending process. Afterward, you can use the external hard drive normally.

>> Format with Disk Management

Step 1. Press the Win + R keys at the same time to call out the Run box. Then type diskmgmt.msc and hit OK.

Step 2. In the disk map area, right-click the external hard drive that needs to be formatted and choose Format from the shortcut menu.

Step 3. Select the desired file system and click OK.

Step 4. When you see a warning message which reads “Formatting this volume will erase all data on it”, you just click OK to continue.

Step 5. Wait for Disk Management to finish the work.

If the process fails, read How Can You Fix “The Format Did Not Complete Successfully”?

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Summary

In this article, we mainly focus on how to fix the external hard drive needs formatting issue as well as how to recover data from formatted hard drive. Also, you may run into a USB/pen drive not formatted error due to similar reasons.

If data in the drive is meaningless, format it directly. Otherwise, consider data restoration if no backup is available. If you have a better suggestion, share it in the following comment section. For any questions about using MiniTool software, please contact [email protected]. We read every thread.