Thursday 17 November 2016

How to Fix Damaged External Hard Drive without Formatting It

Today morning, I have received a very annoying message "Unallocated Drive, Do You Want to Format It?”. I didn’t format the external hard drive as there were many important files including thousands of pictures, the best collection of my favorite songs and movies. Is there any trustworthy damaged external hard drive recovery solution available, that I can use to fix the damaged hard drive error without format? I really want my data back.

When your external or internal hard drive is corrupted or damaged due to certain reasons such as unallocated file system, virus, etc., then, your data in that hard drive will usually become unreachable. And, when you tried to access it on your computer system, Windows will remind you that the hard disk is not accessible because the file system or directory is corrupted. At this point of time, you can try two hard drive recovery solutions, such as using chkdsk command or using a third-party Windows data recovery software to fix the drive and recover lost data. Before moving to recovery section, one thing you should note is to stop using the damaged hard drive, until you fully get your data back, otherwise, you will experience the permanent data recovery failure.

Use chkdsk to recognize and fix the hard drive issue without data loss.

"CHKDSK" command is users first choice for repairing the damaged hard drive and recover inaccessible data. It does not require hard drive formatting and allows you to fix a corrupted hard drive without data loss. Now let’s look how it works for repairing damaged hard drive (I'm using Windows 7 for this demonstration)

1. Plug in your External hard drive to your computer system.
2. Just go to the start menu, type in "cmd" in a search bar, hit enter and then you can see cmd

Window, which allows you to fix your corrupted external hard drive without formatting it.


3. Type in "chkdsk X (external hard drive letter): /F (F stands for Fix error)"


After, finishing all the hard drive fixing steps, Windows operating system will check and fix the file system of the hard drive It usually takes several minutes. After that, if you see the Windows successfully made corrections to the file system in the command window, then congratulations! The damaged hard drive is successfully fixed, and you can access your data with ease. If not, you should try a third-party data recovery software to repair the damaged drive and get back your data.

Use Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Tool to recover data from damaged External Hard Drive

Stellar data recovery software is a proficient data recovery tool which can be used to recover data from inaccessible or formatted hard drives. It supports to extract data from laptop’s or computers hard drives, recover formatted drives data and all storage media like CF cards, SD card, etc. With its powerful data recovery technique and user-friendly interface, it is the best option to recover your inaccessible data from damaged hard drive. After recovering all your important data, you can format your external hard drive to fix the damaged hard drive error.

Conclusion: Before going for the full version for a real damaged external hard drive data recovery, you can first use the free trial version to scan the hard disk and check what files format the software can recover. For a gradually tutorial, please follow this Get Deleted Data Back with Windows Data Recovery Software tutorial. If you don’t get a happy result, just don’t pay for it! You have nothing to lose. But if it works, you will recover your valuable data. So, try it without hesitation whenever you come in data loss situation or face damaged hard drive issue...