Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

My three external hard drives (HDD) are plug and play and required no formatting when I began to use them. Recently on both my laptops, both with Win 10 OS, the system message I get when attaching the EHDs, is that they cannot be read and need to be formattted.

My guess is that the best way to sort this out is to purchase another EHD, format it, then download some recovery software, free if possible, to recover the files firstly onto the new EHD from a problem EHDs, then formatting the emptied EHDs in turn and transferring the files to them. I'd be grateful if anyone could recommend approriate software and perhaps make commet on my approach. Thanks on advance

This is odd behavior, for sure. If your data is of value to you, it is best to seek professional assistance just to be sure that no data is lost. That said, it is odd that all three drives would behave this way at the same time on multiple systems.

Best practice is to get a full sector-by-sector image of each drive, then to use various data recovery programs to scan for your lost files to save to another drive.

For imaging, you can use ddrescue or hddsuperclone in Linux or you can use the integrated imaging within UFS Explorer Professional.

For recovery, you can try Raise, UFS Explorere, R-Studio, GetDataBack, FileScavenger or DMDE.