External hard drive suddenly "needs to be formatted" after a reboot

[Dark Rider]

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?

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello mate, perhaps checking the HDD will tell you something.

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities

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[Dark Rider]

I'll try that .. thanks.

 

[Dark Rider]

I have tried the above. This drive is a Seagate, and i think because it's connected via a USB, SeaTools cannot even see it.

I have also tried Partition Table Doctor which I have read may fix this error with a Fix Sectors module. It told me it could not fix the drive and to use Data Recovery Wizard to recover the data. ( both by EaseUS) I then tried that and it's telling me it's found 864 gigabytes of recovered data - on my 80 gigabyte drive. Clearly this wont work and something here must be in error.

Does anyone know what I should try from here?

 

[jumanji]

Simple question. Did you try the drive on any other working computer? What is the result?

 

[Dark Rider]

Yes, I tried the drive in another PC.. same results.. i get the drive needs to be formatted before use error.

 

[jumanji]

Can you please put out a screenshot of how the disk appears in the Device Management?

Does it appear in the Device Manager?