Help! Win 7 telling me I need to format external drive before using that has been in use for years

I've got an older WD external drive that is externally powered via power cord. Recently, I began to notice a pop up on my screen telling me I needed to format drive M before using it. It popped up over and over and would boot up Lightroom as a result. I disconnected all my USB hookups to try and find the culprit. It seems that this particular drive is it. When I plug it in I hear the familiar " bug duh" that recognizes the connection however, it is not showing up in "my computer" and I cannot get it to recognize. Does anyone know how I can fix this or anything I can try to do as I am at wits end. It just started randomly and was working fine a few days ago. Thanks!

It might be a software bug somewhere but most of these external units start to fail electronically one way or another before the drive goes bad. You could try it on a different computer or try swapping the cables. To see whether or not it is the enclosure or the drive the definitive test would be to connect the drive to a computer after removing it from the enclosure. If it is the disk itself that i starting to go data recovery software might get your data back if it isn't too far gone. In the meantime I would avoid accessing it unnecessarily or doing any kind or read or write attempts outside of recovery.

If you want to check or tey to recover your data "read only" you could try the deft toolkit.

http://www.deftlinux.n​et/about/

I use it for critical situations, it works very well indeed.

Just a guess, but I suspect the USB interface of your external drive is going bad. That is not a death sentence. It just means that you may have to open the case, and remove the drive so you can use the HD with another adapter or interface. I have seen more than my share of external USB drives fail in this manner.

I have a USB to IDE/Sata interface that I use in this situation.

Hope this helps,

110yd

I agree that the supporting electronics of the external harddrive could be at fault...open up the enclosure and remove the harddrive itself, insert it into a docking unit...you could find everything is fine.

I had a WD Mybook that failed, I broke into the enclosure (I had to hacksaw the frame apart to get the HD out!), put the HD into a docking unit, and had access to all of my data.