Do you get that sinking feeling when you connect your external USB drive and get an error that your drive needs to be formatted? Even worse the device is not detected at all. This problem is also very common with laptops as they are portable devices and tend to get knocked about quite a lot which is not good for the hard drives inside the unit. There can be several causes to this problem and the last thing that you need to do is mess around with the drive as any mistakes could prove costly as you make it even harder to recover data from your external hard drive.

There are simple checks that you can do to verify what the problem may be.

  • Does the drive actually spin up can you hear that the drive is turning,...