Trying to back up a 2.5" HDD in an enclosure, says "must Format" first.

Hi, I have a laptop here with a weird blue screen error. Boots up, shows Windows XP loading screen, then blue screens and immediately restarts. This loops forever.

I bought a 2.5" IDE enclosure to backup all the files on the drive before I begin trying to fix it. I plug the drive in, it recognizes it as a USB Mass Storage and sets it to G: automatically. But when I try to access the G: drive, it says you must Format the disk first.

I Google'd and it said, try taking off the jumper to set it into 'Master', which I did but it still says I need to Format.

What should I do, how can I fix this?

 

Why dont you try formatting it like it says?? I would just do NTFS these days.

 

I think the problem might be that he wants to rescue the files already on the disk.

Don't reformat the disk at all, just run the Windows install CD in Repair mode.

 

If so, this was real clear then.

 

It would've been better if he said "I took the hard drive out of my laptop and put it in a 2.5" enclosure so I can plug it into another computer and back it up", but still, the title does kinda suggest the enclosure is a tool for backing up the drive therein.