The disk in drive E is not formatted...

Hello Geeks! I have been a fan of your site for years :drool and y'all have rescued me many times and occasionally made me look smarter than I actually am. I am hoping that you can assist me. If this is redundant to a post elsewhere, please redirect me there and I apologize for taking your time.

I have a Dell running Win XP for home. I have two disk drives, C and E. The C Disk does all of the work (i.e. runs the programs, has the desktop on it, etc.) The E Disk was added a year or so ago (Frankensteined in from another computer, where it used to be the C Disk). I use the E Disk for storage of big files like pictures.

Recently when I opened "My Computer" and tried to access information on the E Disk, I got the following message: "The disk in drive E is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

I clicked "No" (as I recall, formatting a drive full of files is a bad thing). Then I googled this error and followed the instructions here.

I wasn't sure which drive was the C and which the E, so I tried it with both drives. (Obviously, I don't know what I am doing.) The first time, it created an F Disk with a bunch of files on it.

The second time, upon reboot it gave me some testing options. I ran the quick test, got a few error codes, didn't know what to do, then exited the test and went to my desktop. (The most common error code was "Error Code 0f00:1344. Msg Block 66356: Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected.")

My problem isn't fixed, and now I have a new F Disk, too. I'm stumped as to what to do next, since I don't know what I'm doing or even where to start learning.

Thanks for reading this.

 

The bad news is 9 times out of ten, a disk not formatted means a failing disk. As the HD you used was from another system most likely it has gone past its useful life and has failed. What I would do pull the hard drive out of the computer, find the MFG and the model number. Then google some drive tools for that specific MFG. Run a scan on the drive and see if SMART has failed the drive. If the drive is toast you can try any one of a multitude of hail mary passes to get the important data off the drive. My favorite is throwing it in the freezer. I've never seen it work but know people who swear by it.

 

There is also another alternative you can try.

There is a utility on this site that might help.

http://majorgeeks.com/EASEUS_Deleted_File_Recovery_d3939.html

I had the same problem with an external HD and I was able to recover over 200 GB of data from a disk that had a corrupt boot sector and I was getting the same error message about formatting that you are now.

Give it a shot and let that program scan drive E: One thing you know for sure is that mechanically, it appears to be working otherwise, you would not see it listed in My Computer. Usually but not always, if the drive has a mechanical failure it will not show at all. What I think you are having is a logical drive error. That means likely, all your stuff is there. We just need to find it.

Good luck with the above program.

 

Thank you both! I'll give the freezer and the recovery tool both a try... but not in that order, I suppose.

 

No, do the recovery disk first.