External says that it needs formatted. But, I want to save the files.

[KasketKyle]

I have a bunch of pretty important files on my external hard drive. It has worked fine for the longest time now. I let a friend of mine hold on to it to work on music (we are in a music group together). Today he called me and said that he hasn't had it plugged into his computer (running vista) since mid october, but when he did today it said that it needed to be formatted. The files on the external are VERY important to us, but I can't find a way around it. Can someone please help me?

[patio]

Plug it in to your machine while the power is off.
Power up.
Right clik My Computer and select Manage...then Disk Management.
Find the external drive and right clik it and select Properties.

Report back with the results.
If it says RAW under Properties then it was most likely unplugged without using the Safely Remove Hardware tool and your data is most likely gone...

[KasketKyle]

layout: simple
type: basic
file system: raw
status: healthy



so it looks like it is probably lost. is there any way at all of possibly recovering it?

[Geek-9pm]

Wait. How much time do you want to spend?
Here is a long list of Disk Tools. Some claim they can do things you can not do with the Windows tools. Take a look, Some are free.
http://lists.thedatalist.com/pages/Hard_Disk_Tools.php

[JJ 3000]

so it looks like it is probably lost. is there any way at all of possibly recovering it?

You can try http://www.recuva.com/
it might recover some of your data if you're lucky