Unable to initialize the external drive in Windows 7

Britton30 said:

Does the drive work in another computer ok?

What about this?
What OS did you use to add data to the drive?

I may be wrong, but it would appear you or someone did something in the last two days that "broke" the drive.

Would I tend to agree with Britton30? Not yet but may eventually:) if the following does not work. ( I wouldn't even discount that it died on its own without you or someone else causing it. )

1. Are you using an USB hub? Are you using an USB extension cable? If so dispense with them. Also try your drive with another USB cable.

2. Download Thumbscrew from Thumbscrew: Software USB Write Blocker . Extract the Zip to a folder and run thumbscrew.exe. You will have a thumbscrew icon in the System Tray with which you can toggle "Make USB Read only", "Make USB writeable"

Make your external drive writeable. ( requires a plug-out and plug-in for the change to reflect)

If it works post-haste copy all data elsewhere and give the drive a thrashing by formatting it with HP USB Disk Storage Format Utility.

If it does not work, well, you may have to get into Recovery Mode. Most recovery software will fail to see the drive. Someone, somewhere had said File Scavenger was successful. ( I haven't heard of File Scavenger. Google and find about it)

Let us know how it goes.

( And yep, before I tried Thumbscrew, I created a System Restore point. If I do not intend to keep it I shall do a System Restore. Thumbscrew adds atleast one registry entry on write protect if it is not there already. In my case it was not there and so I would like to bring the registry back to its original state if I do not intend to keep it ticking in my System Tray. That said it appears to be a quite useful utility.)