I've an external hard drive on which I store lots of music for listening to when I'm working or transferring to my car's MP3 player.

Suddenly today it's started acting up. Clicking on the hard drive's icon I get a message telling me that 'the disc in drive K is not formatted'. Drive K is the location of said external drive.

I downloaded PC Inspector File Recovery which revealed that all of my folders on the external drive are still intact. It allows me to access them and copy them to my internal hard drive, but that's a long and laborious process.

So is there any way of persuading my external drive that it still exists?

All advice gratefully received.