A Message Says You Need to Format Hard Drive Before You Can Use It, Help
I want to transfer some music to my computer, but I get a message saying that 'You need to format the hard drive before you can use it.' I don't want to format my external hard drive since I don't want to lose my music. So what should I do now?
Best Answered by
Sherly· Answered on Dec 20, 2023
If you didn't properly remove the external hard drive the last time you used it, it might have been corrupted or turned into a RAW format, so you can try reformatting your external hard drive. If you don't want to lose your music or other important files, you can use EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to recover data from them first. You must try to repair the RAW format; otherwise, your hard drive will remain unusable.
As for formatting a RAW hard drive, I recommend that you use EaseUS Partition Master. Its "format RAW drive" feature can help you turn a hard drive into NTFS/FAT32/exFAT or other file systems you want. It is easy to use, and you can format your RAW external hard drive following the steps below:
Step1. Connect your external hard drive to a Windows PC. Download and open EaseUS Partition Master.
Step 2. Locate your external hard drive and right-click on it. Choose "Format."
Step 3. Choose the cluster size, partition label, and file system for your external hard drive. And click "Yes" to continue when you see a warning.
Step 4. Click "Execute the task" and wait for the process to finish.
Now, you can try again to check if you can use your external hard drive now.
Hope it can help.
