reformatting my external hard drive without losing data

Hi, my 500gb samsung usb h.d stopped working when my O.S(w7) did. I;m not sure why- possibly a virus. I have since reinstalled W7 and i cant open the hard drive- in disc management it tells me its a healthy, active primary partition RAW but keeps asking me to format it. I downloaded a data recovery program which shows me all my files are still on there but i need to reformat it without losing those files. i have been told i can reformat it to a NTFS format from the command prompt without losing data but i'm a little nervous about it, any ideas?

 

Greetings, globestroller.

I'd be leery of 'formatting without losing data' - sounds like an oxymoron.

If the data recovery program doesn't give you the option of saving your files, you might try booting to a live Linux environment, such as Mint, and recovering your data via flash drive or optical media, then formatting the drive through Windows.

 

Hello Caliban, thanks for your reply, i'm not sure what that involves, i am not fully i.t literate, the program i have used is EASUS data recovery but it will only allow 1gb of data retrieval before you have to buy. Do you know of any other software that may be suitable? i have tried p.c inspector and diskgetor without success, i read that Partition magic may be an option, my problem is i dont have any other storage options.

 

MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition 6.0 will recover an unlimited amount of data for free. For some reason it is not longer on their website. You can get it here though. Do not format though! I believe this software will recover a RAW disk without formatting.

 

Thanks Tgell,
There is nothing on the link u sent called Minitool, there is a program called File Scavenger data, is this what you meant?

 

I found it, so there is no way to reformat with the files still on the drive?

 

No, you cannot reformat with files still on the drive. That would be a mistake as Caliban said. Another program you might want to check out is TestDisk if Power Data Recovery does not work. Be sure to read the step by step instructions.

 

I was able to get this from Google cache on the data recovery tool.

Note: Always save the files to a drive other than the one you want to take date from.

 

OK, Thanks, thats some very useful info there. I am scanning now and wait the results, theres a lot of files! Appreciate your input.