Buffalo external hard drive is asking to be formatted

[Guest]

I have lots of information stored on my external buffalo hard drive, however when I have tried to access it today it says it needs to be formatted.

Message f:\ is not accessible. The paramter incorrect

It used to show up as a h:\drive, but now appears as f:\drive.

I have followed threads to unplug, restart, try it on another computer, but its just the same.

Please can you help?

 

[ComputerJunky112]

I have lots of information stored on my external buffalo hard drive, however when I have tried to access it today it says it needs to be formatted.

Message f:\ is not accessible. The paramter incorrect

It used to show up as a h:\drive, but now appears as f:\drive.

I have followed threads to unplug, restart, try it on another computer, but its just the same.

Please can you help?

I HAD THE EXACT SAME PROBLEM

My Buffalo 500GB (HD-PCT500U2/B-US) hard drive went down last week and was unusable (it said “reformat needed”). I’ve read numerous posts by people who simply threw away their HDD when this happened.

1. I took some advice from an IT friend at Siemens and and he had me run the following hard drive check:

“You can plug it in and go to command line and the drive letter for your external followed by : and then hit enter then type ATTRIB -S -H *.* /S /D press enter”

At this point, command prompt said "Data error (cyclic redundancy check)".

2. I Googled “cyclic redundancy check” and came up with the following link:
http://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Cyclic-Redundancy-Check-Error

3. I followed the instructions at that url. It took several hours, but it repaired the HDD, which is now usable again.

Glad I didn't throw it away. . . .

 

[ComputerJunky112]

I tried and none of the free recovery programs worked because the drive was "inaccessible" due to the "cyclic reduncancy check" (CRC). The drive had to be repaired before the recovery programs could read the information.