Most of us prefer to maintain the information in an external hard drive when it comes to maintaining a backup. However, the hard drive may be corrupted by an extreme case and you may end up losing all the information stored in it. But what if that drive gets corrupted and you need to reformat it to make it again available?
Without losing all your information, can you reformat it? It's feasible, of course, but can you?
The answer is yes. By formatting your drive and then using a data recovery tool to restore your information, you can reformat the drive and maintain your files. For both Windows and Mac OS platforms, the method for the same problem is distinct and we will cover both platforms for you.How to Reformat an External Hard Drive without Losing Your Data on Windows
It's fairly easy to reformat the external hard drive on Windows.
Follow the steps below without losing information to reformat the external hard drive on Windows:
- Connect your Windows PC to the external hard drive via USB cable and wait for recognition.
- Open File Explorer > This PC > Shortcut
- Find your external hard drive under the 'Devices and Drives' section and right-click it to open the context menu.
- Click on 'Format' but make sure you tap the box that says 'Quick Format' before doing so. If you don't tick that box, all the information will be lost.
Do not write more information to your external drive once you have finished this process. The data left behind during the reformatting process will be overwritten by new data. If you save something fresh, not only one file will be overwritten. It might corrupt hundreds of your previous information.
How to Reformat an External Hard Drive without Losing Your Data on Mac
Reformatting the external hard drive on Mac is a bit distinct because it doesn't have the choice to format quickly, but with a different name, it still has the same choice. Follow the steps below without losing information to reformat the external hard drive on Mac:
- Connect your Mac to the external hard drive via USB cable and wait until it is acknowledged.
- Now Open Finder app > Applications > Utilities Folder > Disk Utility
- Click the name of your external hard drive under the 'Disk Utility' directory. Hit the erase button at the top of the window.
- You will receive a timely notification asking for the full information to be wiped. Click on 'Safety Options' instead of proceeding. Now move the window slider to the extreme left, pointing to 'fastest.' Now press 'OK. '
This is important to make sure that your data is stored securely on the extreme left side of the slider. When the 'fastest' option is selected, not all files on the disk will be deleted. The information may be recovered by a disk recovery application.
How to recover your Data
Use a Sysinfo Data Recovery software for Windows straight after you have reformatted your computer. While it may not be possible for these programs to restore 100% of your records, using them will save more than you would have without attempting this method. You can choose from a variety of data recovery software alternatives, but here are some of the most popular.
Conclusion
Not everything is overwritten on your external hard drive. You can now use any data recovery software to recover information from the external hard drive that is already given in this article to help you in this situation. But make sure no new documents are added to the external hard drive without extracting the ancient information stored on it. We make sure this software helps you with the external hard drive issue.
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