Unable to initialize the external drive in Windows 7

Hi,
I have an WD Elements 1023 external hard drive which I want to connect to my laptop which runs a 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium. When I connect the device, it shows up in the device manager and the driver is installed properly.

However, it doesnt show up as a drive and in the Disk Management, it shows as Disk1 unknown. When I try to Initialize the disk, I get a error that the "The Media is write protected".

Its been a real pain as I have a lot of data init and unable to access it.
It wud be great if anybody could suggest me a solution for this.

Thanks in advance!
Harsha

I tried it restarting....but it hasnt worked....

Can you remove the ext. Hard drive from the case?

This may sound incorrect, but it worked for me with the same issue: switch off laptop and ext drive and completely unplug everything from the Ext case, remove drive from the case, reassemble the ext hard drive and plug all components back in before restarting the laptop and ext drive. I have no idea why this worked for me but I hope it works for you too.

Can you put out a screenshot of how it appears in Disk Management?

Where was it being used before?

Hi all,
Thanks for your responses.

So far I have tried restarting the computer with the external HDD connected, but still it is not getting detected. The same HDD was working fine a couple of days back....suddenly its stopped working and its driving me crazy because all my data is init!


Screen shot of how the drive appears in the device manager
https://picasaweb.google.com/1145644...08574510479554

Screen shot of how the drive appears in the disk manager
https://picasaweb.google.com/1145644...07129219976018

Hi,
I checked the diskpart from the command prompt and the disk is listed.

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 465 GB 1024 KB
Disk 1 Online 931 GB 931 GB

So does this mean that the external HDD is not physically damaged?

Regards
hechesspee