Freaking out big time here! Basically my external hard drive was pulled from the usb in the middle of a file transfer and now everytime I try to open it,it says the ''file or directory is corrupted or unreadable''. It still shows up the correct information such as space used up and available space on it when I go into properties. It says the file system is NTFS (if thats any use at all!). There is an option in the properties to check ''the volume for errors'' would this be worth doing? Is there any way to get back the information on it? What does format mean - will it just reset the entire thing - and does that mean I will have all the available space restored just like when I bought it? ANY help is appreciated! Just having a mini meltdown at the moment...
Formatting means that the drive will be reset, in a manor of speaking - it will rebuild the file system, deleting everything that's on the drive (basically, wiping it). Checking for errors won't do any harm - that's just checking after all. But knowing windows, I'd say it'll just say that it can't check for errors because it can't access the drive As a first step, I would try to connect the drive to other PCs or possibly also a Unix/Mac machine.
