ok so my computer was dying on me an i figured it was the hardrive wen i set it to slave and tried it on my brothers computer i was able to browse through the files in the hardrive.. anyway so i tried it again and the hardrive says that it has to be refformatted.. can i save my files that were on the drive????
yes you can save them. As long as the drive is spinning and shows up on your computer you can save almost all the data. The only time you can't recover data is if the hard drive heads are damaged. But it seems your drive is still working since it shows up on your computer. At worst a few corrupted files will make the entire drive seem usable but all the data is still there and perfectly save. You can try doing a chkdsk x: /f (x = drive letter of drive) this can fix the corrupted files. If that doesn't work the free testdisk (photorec addon) can recover data from severely corrupted drives. If you get the message that the drive needs to be formatted (or drive is raw), that is a symptom of file corruption. A chkdsk can usually fix that.
