New
#21
Nowhere before had you stated that you have important data on your external drive and you want to recover it.
In that case the whole strategy should have been different with no attempt to initialise it or format it.
You should have straight away gotten on to Data Recovery mode.
You have, following mjf's instructions, run diskpart Clean command and that has really cleaned the first sector zeroing it. So now there is no MBR code/partition information in it. Fortunate you were unable to create a partition that would have destroyed all data or could have made it more difficult to recover.
Not to worry. I am now formulating a strategy to rewrite the MBR - you have already said that Partition Wizard does not even show your external drive.
For rewriting the MBR, we shall try using Bootice. Download Bootice v 1.1.5 rar file ( x86 or x64 as appropriate to your system) and extract the rar file into a folder to get the .exe file.
Booooooooting • View topic - [ BOOTICE: A poweful boot-related utility ] - v1.1.5
Plugin only the problem external drive (remove all other drives/pen drives), right click on the .exe file and run as administrator.
Select your external drive and then click on Process MBR.
In the ensuing dialog box, select Windows NT 5.x / 6.x MBR and click on Install / Config tab.
Once the MBR is written, close Bootice and shut down your computer. Unplug the external drive.
Reboot and then plug-in your external drive.
Now run Partition Wizard.
If the drive shows up, run Partition Recovery Wizard and try to recover the partition.
Recover a flash drive turned RAW – Partition Wizard and TestDisk. (Go to the topic Recovery with Partition Wizard: SanDisk Cruzer Blade 16GB. In your case it will be your external drive)
Note: In this procedure we are only trying to rewrite the MBR in the first sector. It in no way affects the data which remains in the other sectors. If Bootice is unable to see the Western Digital External drive, then we may have to resort to some other data recovery procedure. I am keeping my fingers crossed.:)