Hard Drive "Not Initialized", "device is not ready",won't recognize

Industrial Log said:

......- In Disk Management when hooked up directly to the motherboard via SATA cable, it lists it as "Disk 2", "Removable" and allows me to designate a drive letter, and change drive letter.. but the drive won't show up. When I type the drive letter ("N:\") in Windows Explorer, it says "Please insert a disk into Removable Disk (N:)"

So it's not looking good. If anybody has other ideas, perhaps data recovery software to try out, please let me know. And thanks for the advise so far, I appreciate it.

Since Disk Management still shows it as drive albeit as a removable disk, I would think that you should give TestDisk a shot.

Regain a lost drive using Test Disk - An Illustrated Guide

Recover a flash drive turned RAW – Partition Wizard and TestDisk.

Yep, we are shooting in the dark. Let us, in all directions.:)

Well, my story has a happy ending. I brought my dead harddrive into work and let my electrical engineer have a go at it, he has a similar cable to my Drivewire.. he hooked it up to his laptop running Windows 8 and it immediately recognized it (using USB3). We copied the files over and left the drive alone so I could try his cable at home using the drive to see if it worked. It works (via the USB on the new cable setup) on my desktop.

Next I tried my original cable setup (to make this a USB drive), and that works now as well. Somehow I think Windows 8 got through whatever was blocking it and unfroze it. Or I just got lucky.

Good to know that. And yep, I do remember having come across such an incident. So I think we should ask OPs to try on a Windows 8 machine as a first step.:)