Perform a full scan with your antivirus tool of the external drive.

If possible, perform the scan on a secondary computer in case the disk is infected to minimize the damage if the virus somehow spreads.

Attach the external drive to your computer.

Follow these general steps to ensure your external drive is not infected: Many of the viruses and malicious software in the wild cause damage to your storage devices. You also may have attached the drive to another machine that was infected with a virus or malware. Even if you have antivirus software installed on your computer and feel it is free of infection, you may not have scanned the external drive. Running an antivirus scan is one of the first things to try when you suspect you are dealing with a corrupted external hard drive.

If you are experiencing these issues, you should strongly consider making a byte-level backup of the drive to protect your data. Clicking, grinding or beeping noises from the drive.Files suddenly and inexplicably disappearing.Boot error messages such as “boot device not found” or “boot device missing”.Frequent crashes, system freezes, and slow response time.You might want to get your files off the drive before it becomes broken to the point where it cannot be used at all. Ignoring these signals puts your data at risk if the device completely fails. There are several signs that you need to be aware of that indicate your HDD may be corrupt. How to Get Data From an External Hard Drive Without Formatting? Step 1: Learn More About Hard Drive Corruption Step 1: Learn More About Hard Drive Corruption.

How to Get Data From an External Hard Drive Without Formatting?.

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