Will I Have to Format My External Drive?

alright mastahpiece, so as i was about to transfer a few songs to my external drive, i noticed everything got erased. No one had formatted the drive nor did anyone delete anything. so when i went to open the folder it said "You need to format the disk in drive G: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?" i really don't want to format it considering i have about 250 GB of music, many pictures from back in the day and several movies. if anyone can help, it would be greatly appreciated.

*rep will be given to who ever helps*

 

It could be several things. Before formatting the drive, Open up the pc and make sure the drive is plugged in correctly, they can come loose. Restart the computer and open up my computer and see if it recognizes the all your drives. It could be a processor going bad. If you have another pc, install the hard drive into that pc as a slave, and see if it comes up. Good luck

 

This happened wityh my external to Do not format it. Like this guy above stated; make sure everything is connected; restart a couple of times.. thats what i did and i didnt have to formart. So even if that doesnt work ; take it somewhere or look online for external data recovery or something.
Do you think a magnet could of passed it by; that tends to happen and it erases memory on the hardrive..

 

thanks guys, I've opened my external and everything was connected; I've also tried it on another computer and still, nothing appears. my laptop is just a few months old, i doubt that my processor is going bad :s. i have no magnets around my desk area, so that cant be the issue.
so i recently taken it to a computer store and they said they'll try to recover all my data.

thanks for your help anyways.
*REP ADDED*

 

Hello sir!

try this ;

 

If I may ask, was this hard drive connected to another computer before you connect it to your lap top. I'm only asking this because I saw you said your lap top is a few months old. I've seen many people encountered similar problems when switching hard drive from one computer to another. While most hard drive are plug-and-play some may create a partition on your hard drive for the old computer.