Windows 7: Prompted to format external HD after reinstalling Windows 7 on laptop

Please tell me I didn't lose everything!

I thought I got a virus on my laptop so I reinstalled Windows 7. My 1TB iomega external harddrive was working fine before the reinstall and held approximately 4-500GB of family photos, documents, home videos and music. After the reinstall, I get a prompt stating I need to reformat the external drive before I use it. Please help! I am sick just thinking about loosing all that stuff.



Specs:
Windows 7 Home
iomega 1TB external HD Model LDHD-UP2 S/N: WJAL177817

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

I don't quite know what you've done, but you've deleted the partition that was on your external drive, hence the reason it's showing as a RAW drive.

Check this tutorial for a method of recovering your lost files.

Free data recovery software - recover files from RAW hard drive with EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition.

If the files are successfully recovered you will need another drive to save them to. Do not try and save to the drive you are recovering from. You risk losing your data permanently that way.

Once you've recovered your data you can create a new partition on the drive, give it a quick format then move your data back onto it.

You may also want to check this link, which looks promising.

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

It's just a great pity you didn't disconnect this drive before you reinstalled Windows. We always recommend that you do so for the very reason you are in trouble now.

If you don't feel confident enough to carry out this task you can get specialist data recovery experts to recover your data, but they are expensive to use.

Thanks a lot for your help. I don't know why I didn't think of finding a data recovery program myself. I ended up going with testdisk. I'm still in the process but things are looking good so far (and its unlimited data recovery).