So some time ago, I accidentally wiped my external drive. When I clicked on it in my computer, it said it needed to be reformatted in order to use, which I did not do. I recently started looking for ways to recover my stuff and downloaded the program Active Undelete. I ran a scan and about 20 hours later all of the files that were on my hard disk showed up in the results box. Now my question is--what is the status of the files in the Active Undelete program? Are they like files in the recycling bin that don't take up space? Can I now reformat my external and then recover them from AU back onto the same drive? Or, do I need to first recover all of them to another location i.e. another disk drive first? Lamens terms would be great, I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing but would really love to get my stuff back. And my hard drive is Western Digital, 250 gigs, don't know if that helps.
first I would do a scandisk with the boxes to fix errors checked. If the hard drive got corrupted a scandisk can usually fix that.
also you can try testdisk, its a free hard drive repair software, it has the photorec addon that can recover files from a corrupt drive.
As long as you haven't formatted the drive you can probably get it to work again with a scandisk or chkdsk x: /f repair. All your files should be safe.
The error you got that the drive needs to formatted is a classic symptom of file corruption, a chkdsk x: /f has always fix that for me.
