Heres how it goes...


I use my external as a storage for a lot of important data. Just today, I turned it on and noticed the drive loaded, but, when I clicked on it, it had said "The disk in drive L is not formatted Do you want to format it now?" The hard drive was full to the 450gb mark! Hopefully this can be fixed without losing any data, I don't know what could have caused this to happen.


Your help is appreciated.

Edit: Right now I'm scanning with Data Lifeguard. Its going to take 4 hours, so Ill update when its done.

We hear "The hard drive was full to the 450gb mark!" all too often... The drive is probably toast

Alright so the problem was fixed!

No the hard-drive was not toast...but I did some research and found a program called "PTDD Partition Table Doctor 3.5". Not even a minute and it was fixed. There was something wrong with the boot sector.

Motion - the same problem has happened to me, im at work now but when I get home im going to try and do the same process you used.

Im guessing you downloaded the data lifeguard from the WD support site?

What does the PTDD Patition Table Doctor 3.5 do?

Any kind of advice on exactly how you got yours fixed would be greatly recieved!

You got to buy these tools, sure their is a freeware or OpenSource tool available somewhere. No more toasting of external HDDs..

Motion, thanks alot! Your method worked for me perfectly. I ran the diagnostic and then managed to find a torrent for the Partition Table Doctor 3.0. After installing that it took literally 1 second to fix the problem. Its now working fine again!

Happy Days!

Motion, thanks for the answer. Im not sure if it works yet as partion table doctor is in the prosses of doing its thing. I can however comfirm that as soon as i ran it it told me my Wd external usb drive had a MBR problem. It asked me to rebuild the partition table for it. It is in the process of that. Ive spent days looking for this answer thanks.

just to add some details. i have a 500 gb wd my book premium es connected with the Usb. the first time i installed it, It worked perfect. a day later, i rebooted and it was no more. It would show under device manager but not disk manager or Explorer. Hopefully im free from this burden

Could each of you who said they had this problem please indicate how many partitions on your drive? and how the partitions were formatted? (FAT32, NTFS, etc) thanks!