Unaccessible External Hard Drive: Disk 1 Unknown, Not Initialized

Hello. Through the power of google, I have come here to see If I can get any help recovering data. Essentially found this thread: disk 1 is unknown, not initialized, unallocated and just having really similar issues.

Issue is with my sisters External Hard drive, a WD My Passport Elite 070B.
Asked her a few questions on how she was using the drive/any issues and she explained that she had to pull the usb plug while still reading/writing because it would hang/freeze (/facepalm)



Downloaded PW Minitool Recovery and EasyRecovery Pro Trial, but haven't really run any lengthy tests yet. Just tried them out for 10 mins to see if anything would show up. Going to leave the computer on tonight and do a full scan though.

Some other things I have tried:
-Tried connecting it to other PC's/Laptops(XP/Vista/Windows 7/OSX). Same thing.
-Tried different USB cables

Any suggestions or things I should try?

I'm facing the same problem too....
Un-detection of my ext BUFFALO MiniStation HD-PCTU3 3.0

I'm facing the same problem too....
Un-detection of my ext BUFFALO MiniStation HD-PCTU3 3.0

Yea, this is a common issue it seems. Theres like 3 or 4 of these threads on the first page of Hardware & Devices. Hopefully we will be able to sort it out and get our data back eh

Brunk said:

I'm facing the same problem too....
Un-detection of my ext BUFFALO MiniStation HD-PCTU3 3.0

Yea, this is a common issue it seems. Theres like 3 or 4 of these threads on the first page of Hardware & Devices. Hopefully we will be able to sort it out and get our data back eh

You're better than me. In my disk management, my disk 1 shows no info of 1TB capacity too. What's wrong with it? T_T

Hi Brunk,

1. If you can still copy the data from the "write-protected" drive to another drive do it.

2. Run the long test in Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows and check the results.

1. Ahh i wish there was a way to copy data off the drive, but it does not show up on my computer, so I cannot access the drive.

2. Also forgot to mention that when I run both the quick and extended test, It gives me that error shown in the screenshot. It also gets stuck on sector 255 on quick test, and 692593663
ExternalDriveDiagnosis - Imgur

Another thing that may not be clear from my initial post was it incorrectly displays that it has 2047 GB of unallocated space, even though I believe the drive of the size is 500 GB. And trying to initialize it will give me that error about it being write protected.

mjf said:

If you have damaged the disk file system then this recovery program may help
PhotoRec - Digital Picture and File Recovery
It doesn't rely on an intact file system.

Awesome, I'll give that a go.

This doesn't look good still running PhotoRec but I'm not sure its going to find anything. Its scanning for 4293595136 sectors(x512bytes/sector = 2TB, My Passport has only 500GB)

Any other ideas?