Portable Hard drive not maintaining Format

[supernoob]

I have a Western Digital portable hard drive whose capacity is 120gb. Originally its format was FAT32 and was working fine. The problem started when i tried to format the drive with NTFS. When i was formatting my drive with NTFS using my laptop, the laptop suddenly shut down. I started the formatting procedure again and the drive was successfully formatted in NTFS. Now when i enter any data in the hard drive and then disconnect it, the drive becomes un formatted and unrecognized again. All the data on it is lost, every time it is disconnected from the computer. Please suggest some solution to my problem.

[Wiro]

Is the drive externally powered or does it take power from USB? If the drive is externally powered then there must be some problem with the Power adaptor. The Power adaptor of the drive is not able to provide enough power to the hard drive when the data is being saved on the hard drive. Change the power adaptor and see if the drive can maintain the format or not. If the drive is USB powered then check the connecting cord of the drive if it is proper and change it if necessary.

[Lambard]

May be the hard drive is not formatted properly and needs to be formatted again. The hard disk is not able to maintain its format only when there is some problem while formatting the drive. The file allocation table does not created properly if the hard drive is not formatted properly. You can reformat the drive from windows and see if the drive maintains the format or not. If the drive still does not maintain the format then use command line functions to format the drive. Access the drive using command prompt and then format the drive using it.

[Deep23]

The drive must have gone bad and needs to be checked. You can download different diagnostic tools to perform tests on the drive. Diagnostic tools have a number of test which are performed on the drive to check the consistency of the drive. There are number of test which detect bad clusters or bad sectors on the drive and try to repair them if detected. These utilities are available for free on the Western Digital official website.

[Simond]

If the windows is not able to format the drive use some other applications which will help you in formatting the drive. Swissknife V3 is an application which can be run in windows mode while USBAdvance is an application which can be run in DOS mode. I would suggest you to use USBAdvance as it works in DOS mode. Before using any application to format the drive, first make the drive empty by deleting all the data on it. After formatting is complete, eject the drive safely and then plug it in again and check the format of the hard drive.

[Gonzo]

Check the port on which the drive is connected. It is possible that when the laptop shut itself down the port on which the drive is connected must have gone bad. To check the port, connect some other USB mass storage device to the same port and check if it gets detected. Also check if the data transferred to the device is accessible again after disconnecting and then connecting the device again.