External hard drive cannot be accessed.

[quas]

I don't know what led to this, but when I plug in my external HDD to access the data, it keeps displaying the same error message: "You need to format disk in drive H: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?" I don't want to lose the data, how can I access it without formatting? Thank you in advance for helping.

Tried Recuva, it wants to reformat as well.

Tried Testdisk, I got this:

 

[quas]

Okay, I don't want to format the disk, so I'm going to try TestDisk first. It seems like TestDisk has chosen the wrong file format? It should chose NTFS instead of FAT. Anyone know how to use TestDisk?

 

[quas]

The data is on this disk and this disk is now unusable and the data therefore inaccessible. I am not sure what you mean by copying.

 

[quas]

fourmagicparts has the better answer, even though the solution provided by bobbydsl is the one I actually used, because I skipped through reading four's solution.

 

[quas]

Best answer selected by quas.