Corrupt External Hard Drive

[Evulafro]

Ok so here is the deal, its really quite simple it seems that the external hard drive forgot what its system was. When I check all my hard drive say FAT 32 or NTFS. when I check this one doesn't have anything written down at all, the column for its file system is just blank.

I ran stellar phoenix and it basically said it was either to corrupt or invalid.

I'm not really sure what i should be doing, should I format it, and then run a file recovery software and hope for the best, or is there any way to remind it of what its file system was before the issue.

It happened after a friend of mine connected it to a Wii.

Also under properties it says its RAW. Apparently alot of hard drive have been forgettin their size, and it might of happened to this one, since its 500 GB but properties registers it as 0 bytes which was what i was hoping was the issue but when i ran HDD capacity Restore which i believe is the correct program for the drive just didn't show.

 

[yangly18]

hopefully there is nothing important on it, I would reformat it completely. First run the disk check utility on it though, make sure you have it checked to fix corrupted blocks. If check disk doesn't find anything format.

 

[Archean]

Try running TestDisk on it; I think it may be able to fix your hard disk's partition along with data.

 

[Ultiweap]

Do what Archean told you. A friend got the same problem before and the only way he got was to reformat.

 

[LookinAround]

<snip>
I'm not really sure what i should be doing, should I format it, and then run a file recovery software and hope for the best, or is there any way to remind it of what its file system was before the issue.
<snip>

1) Run file recovery software BEFORE you attempt reformatting
2) Try TestDisk as Archean suggests (many have had good results with this tool in similar situations)

@yangly18
A minor technical point but to clarify:
> Chkdsk will only run if Windows recognizes the disk filesystem (e.g. if Windows reports it's NTFS or FAT)
> Chkdsk won't work on a RAW filesystem (i.e. Windows doesn't recognize any filesystem)

 

[Evulafro]

Thanks guys Dled and running the program. Will let you guys know how it turns out.

Edit: It worked like a charm thx guys