Being Your External Hard Drive's Doctor when it demands Formatting.

This is a common hard drive fault that I think most of us have run into at one time or another . This problem seems to be even more prevalent with the popularity of portable external hard drives like the Transcend. 

I attribute the need for Data Recovery Help to not safely removing the USB drive from the operating system before unplugging the drive. The reason this causes a problem is that Windows is always caching to the hard drive temporary files needed for operation, when you just pull the USB cord of these drives that data has no where to go and inevitably writes somewhere that is inconvenient.

 

How to fix the external hard disk drive using Command Prompt

CHKDSK [volume[[path]filename]]] [/F] [/V] [/R] [/X] [/I] [/C] [/L[:size]] [/B]

• volume     Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon), mount point, or volume name.

• filename     FAT/FAT32 only: Specifies the files to check for fragmentation.

• /F     Fixes errors on the disk.

• /V     On FAT/FAT32: Displays the full path and name of every file on the disk.

• On NTFS: Displays cleanup messages if any.

• /R     Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information (implies /F).

• /L:size     NTFS only: Changes the log file size to the specified number of kilobytes. If size is not specified, displays current size.

• /X     Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary. All opened handles to the volume would then be invalid (implies /F).

• /I     NTFS only: Performs a less vigorous check of index entries.

• /C     NTFS only: Skips checking of cycles within the folder structure.

• /B     NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume (implies /R) 

  The /I or /C switch reduces the amount of time required to run Chkdsk by skipping certain checks of the volume. 

   

  Help with CMD on how to fix the external hard disk 

  chkdsk E: /? will guide you on how to navigate through the CMD

  

  Help Link