Need help on jvc hard disk camcorder?

Question

my camcorder fell off the sofa and now when i turn on it comes up"need to format hard disk drive do you want to format all data will be erased" it has my baby growing up on and everything im really gutted please someone help. the make is jvc gz-mg77ek

Answer 1

I'd start by contacting JVC and seeing what they can suggest.  Are you able to see the camcorder as an external hard drive when you plug the USB cable in?  If you can see the files, copy them to your PC, if not, try running PC Inspector File Recovery (it's free).

If JVC don't come up with anything, and you can't see the camcorder as an external drive, life gets more interesting!  You could contact a specialist data recovery company - probably the safest option but potentially very expensive.  You could remove the hard drive, install it in a case to convert it to a USB external drive and then run the disk recovery app.  You'd need to be fairly confident with a screwdriver, but it should be doable.  A third option might be to just let the camcorder go ahead and format the disk and then recover the data afterwards once it's visible to your PC.  It's a high risk strategy though because it depends on the camcorder only performing a high level format and then not writing anything new to the disk.  You'd have to ask JVC for the details.