every major app for this type of problem i saw recommended: seagate seatools, partition wizard, wd data lifeguard diagnostics, power data recovery, find and mount, a bunch of stuff on hiren's boot cd, test disk, etc. booting in ubuntu and knoppix via cd - drive is not recognized

I need the files on the drive, and have tried all of the following: I have spent all day trying to fix this problem, and have read a million threads on different sites and tried everything, to no consequence. When I first hooked it up, all looked well: the system tray showed correct recognition of the drive and enclosure type/brand and installed the drivers successfully.īut the drive no longer shows up in Computer at all, and in disk management it now prompts me to initialize the disk, and has it marked as Unknown, Not Initialized. So I did, but the drive still isn't working, but in a different way. I tried it on another PC too to no avail.Īfter much research, the most likely solution looked to be to get a new enclosure. in Computer it would not show up or show up as just a drive letter.

I just got it out as I need some files on it, and when I hooked it up it didn't work: the computer recognized it as a CD drive or something. Then I moved and the drive has been packed away in the trunk of my car since. I had a WD 2TB external drive which I transferred successfully to a USB 3.0 enclosure months ago.

Hard drive unknown not initialized