How To Fix A Corrupted External Hard Drive Without Reformatting It

The moment that you plug your external hard drive into your PC, a window will open stating that it can’t be reador – alternatively – that it’s inaccessible. You may even receive a window which suggests formatting it. Regardless, something has taken place that’s now hampering you from accessing your files.

In these types of situations, you need to be strategic in what you do. Making changes may worsen the situation if you’re not sure of what you’re doing. In this article, we’ll have a look at what may have caused this to happen as well as how to recover your external hard drive without the need to format it.

Connect UpTo Another USB Port Or A New Computer

Often, a corrupted USB port can cause an external drive to become inaccessible. You are easily able to fix it via connecting up the external drive to another USB port or – alternatively – a new PC.

Change Drive Letter And Paths

If the fix above doesn’t work, try and change the drive letter and paths in order to show up the external hard drive. Follow the steps below closely:

1. Press the Windows Key + X on your keyboard and choose Disk Management from the menu.
2. Right click on the external drive and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.
3. In the pop-up window, click on Change.
4. In the next window, ensure that you select a drive letter from the drop-down list and click on OK.
5. You will receive a prompt that some programs may rely on drive letters in order to run properly. Click on Yes to continue as long as the drive letter that you assign here is not taken by another drive where the programs are installed.

Run The CHKDSK Utility

The CHKDSK utility will scan through your whole hard drive to find and fix problems. You have to run CHKDSK in CMD. Discover how to fix a corrupted hard drive utilising the CMD below:

1. Tap on the Search button which is on the taskbar. After this type “cmd” into the search box. Right click on “cmd” and select “Run as administrator”.
2. Type the following: chkdsk F: /f /r /x and press Enter. F denotes the drive letter of the corrupted external hard drive.

Tips: The meaning of the parameters utilised—“/f” tells chkdsk to fix any errors that it finds; “/r” tells it to find the bad sectors on the drive and recover readable data; “/x” forces the drive to dismount prior to the process starting.

Type Exit And Press Enter In Order To Exit Command Prompt.

Note that if the external hard drive becomes RAW owing to certain damages, you could encounter the error that CHKDSK is unavailable for RAW drives. In this context, you are able to use a professional data recovery tool like Recoverit Pro to recover data from the corrupted drive in order to another place and then format the drive to make it usable once again. Once this is done you can sit back, relax and enjoy playing at your favourite South Africa online casinos safe in the knowledge that your data is secure.