The disc in drive H is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

Question

I'd like to access some old files on my old internal hard drives. They were working perfectly fine not long ago, however I have since disposed of their old towers (inc. motherboards etc).
When I attach the hard drive on my current PC (running XP home edition) I receive the above message. Basically I'm wanting to know what I can do (if anything) to access the files using my current set-up (I can give PC specs if necessary). Thanks in advance.

Engineer_Tech · Accepted Answer

The fact that you are getting the "Format Now" error message, this is probably going to mean that the actual Hard Drive is fried.  You can maybe try running a Data Recovery program on it to see if you can get any of the data back.

If the above method fails, you will most likely need to pull your drive apart, put it up under a microscope and see if you can figure out what the problem might be.  I would recommend not doing this yourself, as you probably do not have a clean room to work in, a microscope or the experience and knowledge to do this properly yourself without damaging some internal components in the drive.  There is a company that I have had personal experience with that does Data Recovery, they're called eProvided.  I would say for you to give them a call and find out exactly as to what you need to do to get this data back.  Here is their website:  http://www.eprovided.com/d1/hard-drive-recovery.html

Give them a call and see what they say,

good luck.

Trending News

The disc in drive H is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

1 Answer