Unformat external hard drive

TimRishel · Jun 29, 2015

Thank you all again. I took it to a local computer repair shop. Yes they were able to format for PC again but could not recover the contents. I did not write anything too it. He suggested a software that might help.

TimRishel · Oct 31, 2018

Good news. My wife used a software called recuva. It appears we got most everything back. About 400GB of video files. Again, thanks for all the help. Key to this from Grandad was telling me how to get windows to recognize the drive again.

Grandad G

My suggesting will only format your hard drive so you PC will recognise it again. Unfortunately if you haven't backed up your movies etc.. on you PC you will not be able to recover the lost files.

TimRishel

Thanks all. My main concern is recovering the content on it before. I plugged it in wanting to watch a vid and clicked format by mistake. Did not have the media player installed at the time. I have not tried Grandad's suggestion yet.

CHAD TPRUITT

No you can't recover the files...best thing would be to redownload them.

-- Rick --

My main concern is recovering the content on it before

Hi Blowy,

from the above comment I am not sure we made this clear. Below is an except from windows info on formatting:

Reformatting a disk deletes all of the data on the disk

...reformatting [is done] at the expense of deleting everything on the [hard drive]. You would then have to reinstall...by using the original installation files or discs, and then restore all of your personal files, such as documents, music, and
pictures, from backups that you had made beforehand.

Recovery is not possible

TimRishel

Good news. My wife used a software called recuva. It appears we got most everything back. About 400GB of video files. Again, thanks for all the help. Key to this from Grandad was telling me how to get windows to recognize the drive again.

Unformat external hard drive