Hardware External HD asking to be formatted

A friend has his work stuff on a 2.5 external HD but it's asking to format when connected.

Does this mean trying to recover all his stuff using a program or is there another way ?

Yes, you'll have to recover using software. Which generally means you'll need a separate drive to recover to.

I've seen EaseUS recommended a few times on DW: EaseUS | Data Recovery, Backup, Partition Manager & PC Utility Software - I believe that the amount you can recover is limited in the trial version (as it's essentially provided to allow people to check that a drive can be recovered before purchasing the software).

If the drive is showing as RAW in Disk Management, the specific instructions for EaseUS are here: Raw Drive Data Recovery with EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard

Do not format the drive in the mean time.

Your friend should be aware that this might be a symptom of a failing drive. I would strongly recommend doing a SMART scan on the drive, once recovery has been performed.

Thanks for the advice pob

First check that there is nothing wrong with external caddy and/or it's cables.

I would consider plugging HDD directly into a pc or something to see if it can access the data to rule out anything but HDD being faulty

All done thanks for that

@silverdale

did you recover everything m8

Yeah thanks Napster, the person works as a teacher and it was all the school stuff he uses.
I dumped it to a stick and error checked and formatted the hard drive. I've told them for the sake of £25 smash it up and buy a new one