HELP!!!
This is my first time here. My life is on my external hard drive (Passport). Last night I was moving my laptop and forgot my Passport was attached. The Passport disconnected from the wire that connects at the external drive.
When I went to plug it in again, my laptop will not recognize it at all. I get a message that says I need to format the disk in order to use it.
Does this mean that all my information is gone? Please tell me no.
Any help would be extremely appreciated.
I am crying.
Julie
Moderator, move this post to the appropriate forum.
Julie, that was for your benefit; you posted in the wrong forum
Now, when a computer announces with a message that the disk needs to be formatted there are two main reasons for this:
- It was never formatted, or it is the wrong format for the computer. In the case of a Passport, since they are all pre-formatted for the righ purpose, this is not the situation you face…
- If a drive is so “messed up” the PC can’t figure out the exact problem with reading the disk, so it throws its hands up (so to speak) and figures the disk needs to be formatted. It cannot say you dropped the darn thing and it is totally a mess.
I am sorry to tell you that this Passport is “history” and highly likely broken beyond repair or recovery. Likely many things are damaged inside by its hitting the floor. Most likely, the arm inside that reads the data from the spinning disks broke off, hit the spinning disks, and banged around inside scratching and scraping magnetic coating off disks, and taking many bits and pieces of data with it. If you take it to a computer repair, they will tell you the same thing: your data is gone.
The best suggestion at this point is to have a backup strategy for the future. Buy two Passports, of different colors so you can tell them apart, and use one for daily use, and the second one to back up the one in use. There are likely backup programs on the Passport you can use.
Sorry to be the one to confirm the bad news to you and wish it was not the case.
