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External HD says I need to format and also says system can't find

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I am desperate, please can someone help me?

For the past few weeks, my external 1TB Hitachi Hard Drive has been sporadically disappearing and I was able to unplug it and plug it back in and then it would be there again. Today it disappeared and it will not come back. I've tried plugging it in to another computer and it installs itself there and then says there is nothing on it.

I tried going to computer management and telling it to make the drive active, but it says it can't access it. The name of the drive has changed. It used to be (M:)  Lacie but now it says Local Disc (M:) .
http://img4.sellersourcebook.com/users/42439/harddrive....

It gives me a message when I unplug it and plug it back in that says "You need to format the disk in drive M", but I don't want to format it because all of my data is hopefully on it. It says I have 0 free space and 0 used space.

http://img4.sellersourcebook.com/users/42439/harddrive1...

Can anyone help me with this? I started using an online backup service and thought my files were being backed up but when I checked it says that my M drive was selected for backup but that it was not backed up because it is unplugged.

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So that is my only option? Will any of this recovery software be able to work if it can't access my hard drive? Windows can't access my hard drive so I'm wondering how this software will be able to?
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One option is to do a quick format. This will erase the MBR only, which 'points' to files on the disc, not the actual file data. From there, the software should be able to recovery said files/data.

wysir said:
One option is to do a quick format. This will erase the MBR only, which 'points' to files on the disc, not the actual file data. From there, the software should be able to recovery said files/data.



Now my hard drive will not even turn on. It doesn't light up or anything. If I do get it to turn back on, how do I do this quick format?
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