re-installing w/out reformatting...

[craigdoll]

Greetings

A while back I stopped the main (largest) WD_ service application from running in the Task Mgr. in order to free up some RAM to render some large architectural images...I haven't been using it since...

Now when I want access the architectural cad files on it, it wants to re-format, but I don't want to do that.

Is there any way to restart the main largest size WD application w/out reforming?

 (sorry I don't remember the app name in the Task Mgr., only that it was quite large.

[Bill_S]

Are you referring to SmartWare's wdfme?

[craigdoll]

I could be, not sure of the name, but it was the largest of the WD* services running that I stopped

[Bill_S]

Does it give the reformat message when you try to access one of your files?  If so, check in Disk Management to make sure that the partition is healthy.  It's possible that you have some corruption going on.  You could run Windows Error Checking and see if that helps, but I would try opening other files on the drive to see if you still get that format message.  If you don't, it may be just that one file that's corrupted.

[craigdoll]

it gives the reformat message when I click on the drive icon in WinExplorer to expand the node.

I could try again and save a screen shot if you like.

Thanks for replying

[Bill_S]

Yeah, that's most likely some kind of corruption.  I would run Error Checking on the drive and see if it fixes it.  You could also look for a partition recovery utility on the web and see if that will restore the files system.  Maybe someone else can chime in with some specific ideas.

[craigdoll]

This is what I get when I try to expand it

This is what I get from error checking in the properties

[craigdoll]

this is the properties dialog

but yet the other WD parent drive is operational

with the user manuals etc, which is part of the same device...

[craigdoll]

Even searching for a driver wasn,t successful either

I may have to reformat it, I have most of the data backed up on other divices, except the files I was looking for...

[Bill_S]

I'm sorry, I just got back in.  Let me look into this.