My 1TB external harddrive has approx 750gb of data on it after around a year of use. It was formatted correctly before use (I believe), only had one partition and has never encountered any physical impact.
The first problem started a few months ago when I attempted to access certain folders and was presented with “Drive is not formatted, format drive yes or no”, this happened only with the same particular folders containing data and nothing else was affected. Of course, I chose not to format.
Alongside this problem, I noticed while navigating through any other folders by opening via double click or back and forward buttons, access to the drive was very slow at times. I ensured the drive was fully scanned for viruses and found no problems.
I decided to use the CKDSK facility on my XP OS to search and correct any problems, which it detected and corrected a number of ‘bad sectors’. Thereafter, the drive was much improved and I regained full access to the previously mentioned folders causing the “Drive is not formatted” message and the speed problem seemed to have been cured.
Forward to present day, I performed a full reinstall of XP on my desktop PC. I hold all of the required drivers and 3rd party programs for a fresh XP installation in a folder on the external HDD in question. I plugged the HDD in via USB, navigated to a few folders and…. the dreaded “Drive is not formatted” message appeared yet again. I clicked ‘No’ (not to format) and continued searching for the required drivers until the drive simply froze. I unplugged the USB cable, re-attached to all available USB ports only to find the drive did not appear in the ‘My Computer’ menu. If I tried to reboot the PC with the HDD still attached, this would cause the windows load-up logo screen to remain in a loop until I detached the HDD.
I reattached the HDD once XP had rebooted and looked in device manager, this showed the HDD was detected, drivers installed correctly, but still nothing shown in ‘My Computer’.
I downloaded the Western Digital diagnostics tool which simply wouldn’t recognise any external HDD attached.
I removed the HDD from it’s external casing, hooked up internally via SATA and once again run the CHKDSK facility; I believe it stopped at approx 75% with the message “Too many unrecoverable bad sectors” or words to that effect.
I then hooked up to the desktop via USB again after a reboot and found the HDD was now recognised in My Computer so re-run the Western Digital tool- this complained of too many bad sectors and was of no use also.
Last of all, on a friend
