New
#1
External hard drive suddenly "needs to be formatted" after a reboot
I just put about 25 gigs of data on this drive. It's an 80 gig drive and has about 20 gigs of space left on it before it's full. Out of all the files I cut and pasted over it got stuck on this last ISO file.. it refused to move this file.. so i stopped the move operation, and rebooted. I never had any trouble with this drive. It's a drive that is hooked up via a USB port. On reboot, to try to copy or move the file again, Windows tells me this drive cannot be accessed and needs to be formatted before it can be used.
That's not an option, or I'll lose tons of months worth of data. The drive is pretty warm.. I'm letting it cool down to try again, but i cant see any reason why this drive could have been damaged just moving files to it.
Any ideas of other reasons why windows might erroneously fail to detect the drive properly and give me this error?