External harddrive repeatedly asks me to format

[orfajackson]

I have a Hitachi 750 gig external harddrive. It keeps asking me to FORMAT .

What does this mean? Is the harddrive no longer any good?

Thank you guys.

little orfa

[hardy]

Did the hard drive come with a software disc?

[PuzZLeR]

It's quite likely your file system that is incompatible with your existing setup so it will keep nagging you to reformat. If you have, say Windows XP, you would need to format the drive to NTSF instead of the default FAT you likely have on it now, and that should satisfy it.

NTSF is a newer file system that improves upon the older FAT16, FAT32, etc systems and is required by NT, XT and others.

Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management
Highlight the drive
Right Click, Delete Partition, Add a new partition, etc.
Then Format to NTSF, and go out for a walk for a couple of hours until it's done.

All this should correct the problem once and for all.

Hopefully you don't yet have anything valuable on the drive. If you do, and you don't know how to migrate the content from a FAT system (which I think you have as default currently) then most technicians can (probably inexpensively) recover the files for you before you reformat it to NTSF.

[SatStorm]

Another reason could be bad power supply for HDD.
It happened to me more than once.

[hardy]

Another reason could be bad power supply for HDD.
It happened to me more than once.

True, sometimes it can just be the external enclosure. If nothing else works, buy another external enclosure or just put in in your computer and it should read, if not then it's probably dead.

[tomlee59]

I have a Hitachi 750 gig external harddrive. It keeps asking me to FORMAT .

What does this mean? Is the harddrive no longer any good?

Thank you guys.

little orfa

What OS are you using? What kind of computer do you have? Your computer profile info gives no useful guides. Your question is equivalent to "It's not working right. What could be wrong, and how do I fix it?" I.e., it's so open-ended that we can't possibly help.