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My External Hard Drive Says It Needs to Be Formatted: Solution

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My external hard drive says it needs to be formatted or when connect external hard drive, it asks me to format? What is the solution?  You are on the right spot to know answer of this question.

When you connect the external hard drive it asks you to format, something quite frequent. And there comes the fear and doubt: If I format I can access the storage unit, but I will lose the data, and if I do not format I will not be able to access it. However, it has a solution without you having to lose the data.

See Also: How to Clone a Hard Drive in Windows 11

Why does an External Hard Drive Ask to Format?

If you’re external hard drive tells you that it needs to format when you connect it to the port. It could be for different reasons that you should be aware of. The most frequent are:

  • The file system is not recognized by Windows. For example, formats like HFS, ext4, RaiserFS, ZFS, etc. Be careful in these Because if you change to a native Windows format, such as NTFS or FAT32, then the unit may not work in other operating systems in which you are using it.
  • The external hard drive suffers from power supply problems during operation.
  • The external hard drive is infected with some kind of malware.
  • The external hard drive has bad sectors or a partition with bad sectors.
  • The hard drive was corrupted by removing it without using safe mode.

My External Hard Drive Says It Needs to Be Formatted: Solution

Those are the causes, now the solutions to correct this problem go through the following methods:

  1. Use chkdsk

To try to recover your external hard drive without formatting and not have to lose data, these simple steps will most likely solve it:

  • With your external hard drive connected to your PC.
  • Run CMD.exe as administrator on your Windows operating system.
  • Look under Computer for the drive name of your external hard drive having problem, for example, imagine it’s F:
  • At the prompt that appears, you have to type the following command chkdsk f: /f /r /x and press ENTER.
  • Wait for the process to complete and try to connect it again and see if it no longer asks you to format to access it.

In case the problem has not been solved, go to the next point.

  1. With AOMEI Partition Assistant

Another possible solution is to use third-party software, such as AOMEI Partition Assistant. You can download this software from here, and with it you must follow these other steps:

  • Open AOMEI Partition Assistant on your Windows.
  • Now click on the external hard drive that is causing problems, as is the case with F: in our example.
  • Then click on Advanced.
  • And in the menu that appears, click Check Partition.
  • Select the last method Check whether there is bad sector on the partition and click OK.
  • In the new window, click Start and wait for the process to complete.
  • Then you should try again to connect the external hard drive and see if it no longer asks to format.

  1. Try to boot with AOMEI as a last resort

With the same program that you have used before, you can also try to recover the corrupted data that may have affected the external hard drive that is giving you problems. To do this, the steps to follow are:

  • Open AOMEI Partition Assistant.
  • Once opened you should look for the drive that is causing problems, like F: in our example.
  • Click on it with the right mouse button.
  • Select Format Partition.
  • Now you can choose the compatible file system, such as NTFS and press OK.
  • After that you can press Apply.
  • Then Proceed and wait for the process to complete.

  1. Format with Windows built-in tool

In case none of the above solutions has worked, click on format to try to solve the problem and once it is complete, you will be able to access the hard drive again.

See Also: How to remove the Hard Drive from a Laptop

Of course, you should know that your data will be lost, although you can always use a forensic tool to recover the data.

To format from Windows, you can follow the steps below:

  • Go to Computer in your Windows.
  • Right click on the external hard drive that is giving you trouble, like F: in our example.
  • Then click Format.
  • There choose a label name if you want, select the type of file system in which you are going to format, such as NTFS, select quick format, and finally accept.
  • Wait for the process to complete and you are good to go.
  • Now you can apply tools like Test Disk and Photorec to try to recover data that was lost during formatting if you had something important.

Now you will no longer have problems with formatting external hard drives.