External hard drive

[starlight50]

We need help please. My son bought a new laptop, windows 8. He put all material on his old laptop onto an external hard drive. Now when he plugs it in a message appears from Microsoft Windows ' you need to format the disc in drive E before you can use it' When he clicks cancel, it says 'E is not accessible. The volume does not contain a recognised file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted'

We don't want to format it as we understand it would wipe it clean, he has collage material on it and needs to use it. Please help.

[Geek-9pm]

Trying to recover lost data can be hard.
Does he still have the old laptop? does it still work? He made need to try again to make a backup set. Maybe this time using DVDs instead of the external drive.
Here is a collection of articles on doing backups with DVD or CD.
Make Backups With DVDs.
Does that help any? 

[starlight50]

Hello Geek,
Thank you for replying. Unfortunately he sold the old laptop. We thought once the material was on the external hard drive it was safe and ready there to use, shows you how much we know!! He especially put it on there. Is there anything we can do?

[Geek-9pm]

Do nothing.  Not until l you are sure you have a plan. Any writing to the drive will damage data.
Using a working desktop computer, you can try to read the drive and copy to to free space on the desktop. The only items of interest are archives, documents and materiel he created. The operating  system and programs can not be transported. Unless such are t are free programs, in which case you can just download new copies.
This is a free trail tool to help in partition recovery.

MiniToolŪ Power Data Recovery

Bear in mind there is no warranty with this program.
An alternative is to send the drive out to a professional recovery service.

Seagate Drive Recovery

Expect to pay $300 for this kind of service. 

[starlight50]

Thank you Geek, you have given us something to think about, now we have to chat and decide, again thank you.

[patio]

You also may wanna ask him what method he used to copy/move the files...if the HDD wasn't formatted properly beforehand all the data is gone...