I recently bought a 1Tb Elements portable HDD (purchased in April 2012).....of which it has been used to backup my files around 800 GB and just to access them one times a week.I also bought Western Digital WD Nomad Rugged Case. Hasn't been dropped. No moisture. Looked after better than your factory would.

Working fine on Wednesday.....then tried using it on Thursday and the frustration begins.......

The drive spins up, LED lights up and continues to flash constantly...PC makes a sound when connecting the USB. Says installing drivers.....then nothing else afterwards. It says "you need to format the disk in drive g before you can use it"

I've plugged it into multiple PC's and with different cable to eliminate possible problems, but still no luck.

I need this sorted as I have information on there that I simply cannot afford to lose.

HELP!!!

If you have information on the drive that you can't loose then my advice is for you to take the drive to a data recovery firm and ask for a evaluation.
If you want to try to get the files out of the drive, you can try to see if the drive is corretly detected on the device manager, and if so install a copy of Restorer Ultimate on the system drive, and see if it can access the damaged drive. If so copy the files out to *ANOTHER DRIVE*. It might be just a logic/file system issue and if so a file recovery done by a pro shouldn't be very expensive.
If the drive is correctly identified and doesn't have any phisical problem i can run a recovery remotly, on a session encrypted with AES and restore your files to other drive.
But again, if data is indeed of great importance to you, i advice you to find someone near you to get your files back.

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@dreampower,

Based on the exact symptoms, personally I doubt this is just a logical (i.e. filesystem) problem. Because of this, and because you say that you "cannot afford to lose" the data, then there is nothing low-risk that you can sensibly do and, as Spildit said, you'll need to get professional help. There are several professional forum members in the USA, if you want recommendations, depending on where you are and whether you are willing to ship the drive to other states etc.

This is why i think it might be just a logic issue, like damaged file alocation table or bad sector on file alocation table / Partition table, etc ....

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Yes, I understood why you said that, based on the one symptom which you highlighted. However, personally I disagree that this is likely, based on:


... because those 2 specific symptoms wouldn't occur if this was just a logical problem, in my experience. However a deeper problem (which is my hypothesis) could cause both those 2 symptoms and the Windows error message saying that the drive needs to be formatted.

As always, remote diagnosis has limits is based on experience and interpretation - your suggestion could be wrong, or mine could be wrong, or both... If the OP was happy taking risks then we could do further diagnosis, but due to the initial comments, I've given my opinion based just on the symptoms which the OP originally described.

@Vulcan I agree with you

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