Windows 7 - Samsung s2 external hard drive not loading showing local disk F drive

I have a Samsung s2 1tb external hard drive.

Today when I hooked it up to my laptop it would not load. It will shows local F drive when it usually will say samsung Drive.

A pop up box will then appear stating "you need to format drive"

I know if I reformat it I will lose all my data which I will not do.

When I look in device manager it states that the external hard drive is installed.

I attempted to go through start menu and type cmd then F: and it states "The volume does not recognize this system file. Please make sure all required system drivers are loaded and the volume is not corrupted."

PLEASE HELP I DONT WANT TO LOSE ALL MY FILES

With the external drive connected, Go to Disk Management (Start > type: "computer" > click on Computer Management > click on Disk Management)

Determine which disk is the external drive.
If the external drive shows here as a healthy volume, Right click on the large box to the right of the "Disk 1" / "Disk 2" lable and choose: Change Drive Letter and Path.

If there is nothing but a grey box or "Unallocated Space" next to the disk number then Right click on the disk number (the box) and choose: Change Drive Letter and Path.

Change the drive letter to anything else > OK.

If you can't do any of the above post back. If you can post a screen shot of the Disk Management window that can help.
Do not initialize the disk or format it or you will lose your data.

It says its healthy and i changed the drive from F drive to G drive and when it was complete a pop up came back up stating "i need to reformat my g drive"

here is a screen shot of my disk management.

RAW means the drive has a partition, but doesn't have a file system, which is why you are being asked to format it.

Before you do that try using the Easeus Data Recovery Wizard to salvage your data first.

Raw Recovery: Recover files from Raw Partitions, Hard Disk Drive, Memory card, SD Card. Raw File System Recovery Software.

Piriform Recuva is another data recovery utility that many of us use.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

When you've recovered your data you can then go ahead and format the drive.

I think the Easeus product provides a demo version that gives you an idea if it will work. Then you need to buy it.

emausar:
Definitely work on recovering your data before doing anything else.

Seavixen, mjf:
What do you make of the disk being marked as Active? I thought you could not have 2 active partitions at the same time. Could it be a case of Windows ignoring the partition? Do you think by removing the active flag it would become "visible"?

You cannot have more than one active partion on the same hard drive.

If you have multiple hard disks installed on your computer, it's possible for each hard disk to have a partition set as active.

However, the active partition on the first hard disk that your computer's BIOS detects is the one that will start the computer.

It won't hurt to remove the Active flag from the RAW drive.

This tutorial explains how.

Partition - Mark as Inactive

It's ok to have another HDD with an active partition. You need this to do BIOS multibooting.
You shouldn't have more than one partion on the same HDD as active and most partitioning programs shouldn't allow this. You can set multiple active flags in the MBR by accident.
It could be that the HDD was not ejected correctly and the filesystem was damaged.

@emausar
You could try the free Partition Wizard's Partition Recovery Wizard.