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General discussion

external hard drive - only parts are formatted

Sep 3, 2006 5:22PM PDT

I have a 120 gig Western Digital external hard drive that I use with my laptop running on XP home edition.
I've had no problem using the two together for years. But today, after not using the drive for a couple of months I plugged it into my laptop, running on XP home edition. I tried to access some of the folders but a pop up said that the drive wasn't formatted. I checked some other folders and they all opened fine. I noticed it was only the folders that had several gigs of stuff in it that were affected. Is there any way to fix this problem without formatting the drive so I don't lose all data? I also tried to check for errors but it always freezes in phase 1 after a couple of minutes.

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