My main rig runs windows 10, a usb hdd is permanently connected to it and worked fine till yesterday (backup and movies storage), I could not access it without any warning with a message I'd have to format it because it is new, it looks empty although it's loaded with lots of movies and files. My question: how can I retrieve access to its content again without formatting as requested ? thank you
i would suggest booting into a better operating system like linux and see if it still looks empty, and make a backup for that disk. no use believing w10, which is totally unreliable.
Either the external housing (USB port / board) has fried, in which case removing from the housing and connect it internally in PC Or the partition has become RAW (Check in disk management), in which case you need to run a recovery program on it to get your data back (All still there), or if you don't care about the files, delete the partition and create a new one in disk management
hm. the os still sees it as e-drive. i think it would be less hassle to simply boot into linux, i bet the files will still be there.
right clic on this PC then choose manage and then Disk Management to see the partition on USB drive if it is in raw as said MrMagic then it is dead
Run something like EaseUS partition recovery wizard on it, make sure you have enough space on another drive for it to recover the files to Or if the files are not important, delete partition and create new to fix it
the good old chkdsk /r /f did it after having ran for 3 plain hours, it restored to plain ntfs, thank you for your concern, case closed.