How to recover data from an external hard drive?

I’ve got an external hard drive with about 233 GB of data on it, but whenever I try to access it, I get this error message:
G:/ is not available. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. 😢
Is there any way to salvage the files sitting on that drive?

Amanda Barnes7 said:I have an external drive with about 233 GB on it, but whenever I try to access it, I get this error:
G:/ is not available. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. 😢
Is there any way I can save the data currently on the disk?

Look, it’s certainly possible, though you never really know until you dig in. Your first move should be to run a scan using that Microsoft program and the specific module within it I mentioned earlier. I’ve included some links below with instructions and everything else you might need, so just follow those steps, see what happens, and let me know how it goes.😉☕

Alright, great news—I managed to grab version 6.5 of Microsoft (I’d already given the latest release a shot, but since we're only looking at saving about 1 GB, this older version should do the trick perfectly)...
I'll circle back once I have the results...
One more thing I wanted to run by you: once I move everything over to the other drive, am I going to need to format that external one? Or is there some other technical hiccup waiting for me there? I'm not entirely sure how the logic works on that part, so... 😢

Amanda Barnes7 said:Alright, great, I've downloaded the Microsoft version 6.5—I tried the latest one already, but it can only salvage about 1 GB, so this should be much better...
I'll let you know how it goes...
One more thing, once I move everything over to the other drive, am I going to need to format that external one? Or is there some other issue with it that I'm just not catching, because I'm a bit lost here... 😢

Give formatting a shot after you successfully migrate the data, though honestly, it’s hard to say exactly why this happened from over here. It could easily be bad sectors on the drive, or perhaps the electronics inside the enclosure—like the USB-to-SATA controller—are acting up, which happens quite often. When that occurs, people run into issues like this, or they find themselves dealing with Windows suddenly demanding a partition or disk format out of nowhere.🤷☕