1.      Introduction

2.    What causes HDD corruption?

3.      How to Fix Corrupted External Hard Drive Without Formatting 

4.   Other Ways to Fix a Corrupted External Hard Drive

4.      Method 2: Using CHKDSK

5.      Method 3: Using Another Device

6.      Method 4: Format the Drive

7.      Conclusion

1.      Introduction

Yesterday, my hard drive was fine, but today it’s not working. You might be facing the same issue. It looks like the hard drive is corrupted, and you’ve lost your data. Don’t worry, though, because in this article, you will learn several ways, which are about how to fix a corrupted external hard drive, and There will be one that suits you! By the way, if you don’t want to lose your precious data, here we offer the best hard drive data recovery tool for you. Now let’s start!

2.      What causes Hard Drive corruption/damage? 

There are several known causes of hard drive corruption, which causes include:

• Bad sectors
• Issues with the read/write head tracking
• Sudden power losses
• Software failures
• Virus/malware attack
• A malfunctioning antivirus software

3.    Fix Corrupted External Hard Drive without formatting

The first thing to remember is to avoid using the damaged drive until you’re ready to apply the methods that offer the best chance of recovery. While you can restore data, using the wrong methods might mean formatting, then losing everything and starting from zero, risking data security.

To repair the corrupted hard drive, you’ll need a trustworthy data recovery software, and that’s where AnyRecovercomes in.

How to recover data from a corrupted external hard drive with AnyRecover 

So, make sure you download AnyRecover and try it for free. Okay, now after installing AnyRecover, open the application.

Then, click on “PC & Hard Drive Recovery” and select the corrupted hard drive. Now, AnyRecover will scan your hard drive for all the stored data before it was deleted.

Once the process completes. Select the files that you want to recover. And click on the recover button.

Next, you need to select the location where you want to paste your recovered files, and in this way, you can get back all your lost data from your corrupted hard drive.

4.    Other Ways to Fix a Corrupted External Hard Drive

4.1   Use CHKDSK

Click on the start button and search for CMD. Right-click on it and click on “Run as administrator”.

Now, type in this command (chkdsk X: /r). Make sure to replace the letter X with the drive letter of your corrupted drive and execute it.

This process might take some time depending on the size of your hard drive. And once this is completed, try accessing your hard drive again.

4.2    Using Another Device

There also may be a chance that the USB port or the USB Cable that you’re using to connect the hard drive to your computer may be faulty. That’s why try using a different USB cable and even try connecting the hard drive to a different device, mostly another computer.

Even basic steps like this work wonders.

4.3      Format the Drive

If nothing worked, then formatting the drive is the only option left. That’s why you need to recover your data by using AnyRecover which I’ve explained in the first method.

After recovery, just right-click on your corrupted hard drive, click on properties and click on format. Click on Start and finally click on OK.

6.      Conclusion

If your external hard drive is corrupted, you can use the solutions we have outlined in this article. Here to note that formatting the hard drive increases your chances of fixing corruption issues. To avoid losing the data, recover the precious data from the corrupted hard drive before formatting.

Try AnyRecover for free and rescue your drive!