Why does a hard disk suddenly look to Windows as if it "needs to be formatted"?
- by pufferfish
This is more of a theory question, but what are the reason(s) for a disk to suddenly cause Windows to start saying it "needs to be formatted"?
It happens to an IDE disk that I have in a cheap external enclosure, and I can usually get most of the data back by using software like recuva. It's now happened to an internal disk I have. I'm not looking for software to fix this (although links would be appreciated), but rather a low-level explanation as to what gets corrupted on the disk.