External hard drive gone wonky

Ginger_Girl

Hi
Apologies if I am posting in the wrong place. My iomega external hard drive has gone wonky! I can see the files on it, but when I click on them I get a pop up saying that the drive is not formatted and do I want to format it now. The drive has all my music and photos and other files on it :eek::eek:.
Any ideas of things to try? I am completely IT illiterate so please don't worry about patronising! I will try anything!!
Thanks

fwor

It sounds as though it has a corrupted filesystem, but for advice on what to do next you probably need to say a bit more about what the PC you are connecting it to is running.

For most versions of Windows, you should be able to make a note of its drive letter (typically "E:") and then go to a command prompt and type "chkdsk E:". This should give a summary of the state of the filesystem ~without~ making any changes to it.

From this you should be able to make a decision about whether to use chkdsk to repair any damage found. To do this you would enter "chkdsk E: /f", but don't do this yet unless you are sure about the outcome. In situations like this, making the wrong changes initially can reduce the chance of recovering corrupt data at a later stage.

Sooler

see here - same problem
http://forums.dealmac.com/read.php?5,2630100

possible solution may be - use this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk to rebuild the partition table on the external drive

if and when you do resolve the problem - don't only keep one copy of your files - have a backup copy or 2