HELP! External Hard drive needs to be formated?

Hi all.
The issue: i have two Hitachi external hard drives (exactly the same). i unplugged one and switched to the other one while the laptop was on sleep mode. (i thought it was on but i forgot closing the lid puts it to sleep)
This has caused my computer to confuse the two?? and now one of them says it needs to be formatted before it can be used.
I have Active Partition Recovery, and when i try to recover the disk, it tells me it is successful but i still cant access it from windows.
I tried to fix the Boot Sectors but all of them showed green. It also tells me that the Integrity Status is excellent.
i know there is nothing wrong with the drive because i can see that the files are all still there through that program.
Please help. is there any way to get it working again? i have some very important documents and photos on there.
Even if i cant fix the hard disk i dont mind. is there a way for me to copy the files off of it?
Thank you so much for any help and advice. I am honestly very desperate.

 

Hello.

Go to control panel-admin tools-comp management-disk management.

Is the drive there?

Right click the drive, check the drive has used space and free space which it should if the files are unmolested and the file system is working, if the drive shows up as raw the files may still be there but you'll need to use recovery software.

If the drive is visible and has information on it right click and mark as active, you should then be able to see the drive in my computer and be able to access the files.

Post your operating system

 

Also test by connecting to another PC before going any further.

 

Thank you both so much for your replies.
My operation system is Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Intel Core i5 VAIO laptop
I have tried it on other computers and it both shows up as "not accessible"
Yes the disk shows up as RAW under disk management. And it tells me that Free Space is 100% but i know that is not true. because using Active Partition recovery it still shows all my files.
Does anyone know how i can recover my files with that program? Or suggest another program?
Thank you so much for your help.

 

Here are a couple of good data recovery programs, you can run them both, one will find files the other doesn't, choose a location you can find on another drive and copy the recovered files to it.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/pc_tools_file_recover.html

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/wise_data_recovery.html

The longer the search the deeper the search, on some drives I've left them overnight up towards 12 hours,

If you manage to recover your data you'll end up with a lot of files "sometimes in the millions of files", the first thing to do is run this program which will delete any duplicates, make sure you ONLY run this on the copies of your files and not the faulty drive.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/dupkiller.html

The second part is to arrange the files so that you can find what your looking for, windows file options can be really helpful so right click in the folder then arrange the files by type and copy all text and pdf documents to a different folder, do this with all the file types you wish to keep so text and pdf will be in one folder and photo's will be in another, video's in another.

Within these folder now arrange the files by size and copy all the large files into another folder so you will end up with a folder of large videos and a folder of small videos, the size you choose to cut and paste at is entirely up to you e.g for photo's I only usually keep everything above 1Mb.

Depending on the type and size of your files this can be repeated on any file type until you have a searchable number and can manually locate your important documents.

 

Try Roadkil's Raw Copy to get the files back. At the site, select your OS, whether you want the installer version or the stand alone version (no installation required) and click the download button. Take a look at the description of the software as well.