How to restore portale external drive back to normal when it reads corrupt

iasijah

Distinguished
Feb 3, 2012
4
0
18,510
Hello,
I have a seagate portable external hard drive and when i hook it up to my laptop it readsy corrupted and unreadable...then it asks do you want to format...but i know format would change it back to factory setting right???
Help
 

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Format would eliminate all your files. Does it show up in windows disk management? If so, does it have a drive letter? If not, right click on the drive in disk management on the right side of the page and give it a drive letter.

If it actually is corrupted, like from disconnection during a write, you still may be able to salvage some files with a disk recovery tool -- there are a number on HIREN's BOOT DISK, which you can download HERE.