My external hard drive at home says "The disk in drive X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

Question

My external Western Digital hard drive at home says "The disk in drive X: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

HELP!!!!

Answer 1

call WD tech support. they will help

Answer 2

If it is a new hard drive you will need to format it. if it is a old hard drive it it because the file system is different so it won't recognize the drive the best thing to do is copy the contents onto a computer that the hard drive works then format it and retrieve the contents.

Answer 3

Good question. Please read the entie article listed in the "Source(s)". Here's an excerpt: 1 Download Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). 2 Double-click the DMG file you downloaded to mount the CCC disk image. In the window that appears, drag the CCC icon to the "Applications" folder alias to copy CCC to your Applications folder. 3 Launch CCC from your Applications folder. The first time you launch the program, click the "Agree" button in the drop-down pane to acknowledge the license agreement, then click "No Thanks" to proceed to the main interface. 4 Select your Mac's built-in hard drive from the "Source Disk" drop-down menu, then select your external hard drive from the "Target Disk" drop-down menu. If your external hard drive is not in the list, power it on and connect it to your Mac, making sure its icon appears on your desktop. Leave the "Backup everything" option selected in the "Cloning options:" drop-down menu, unless you only wish to back up some of your Mac's data. You can also choose "Incremental backup of selected items", then specify which files to copy using the checkboxes in the file list that appears in the left pane of the window. Note that the external hard drive must be formatted using the HFS+ file system to create a backup with CCC (see References 1). 5 Click "Clone" to begin the process. Then Enter your administrator password when prompted to do so, and wait until the process completes. Be sure that you have rewiewed the backup scheme you've specified in the "What is going to happen:" field near the bottom of the window. Contiuned on eHow's website...

Answer 4

If this is brand new with no data on it, yes you would need to format it.



However, if it is not new, and does contain data, you would not want to format it because you would lose all of your data...



Is it new or used?