Hi,

I have a western digital external hard drive and it was connected to my PC which is operating windows 7. I unplugged the usb cable without "safely removing device" and now when I have plugged it back in it doesn't bring up the drive and a pop up requests to format the external drive. Obviously I have clicked no, but I need access to the docuemtns on the drive and whenever I click on the drive it requests to format the drive.

I am going to try some open source and free data recovery software to try and get the files, but I was wondering if I took it to a friend that had linux, maybe it would be able to see the drive better and the files on it, and maybe that may be the best way to recover the data.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Your assistance or comments would be aprpeciated.

Thanks
John

'Sounds like a good idea: go for it!

And check out this article:

How a Corrupted USB Drive Was Saved by GNU/Linux

Good luck!