External Hard Drive Not Initialized


  1. Crumpet
    Posts : 2
    Windows 7 Professional (64 bit)
       New #1

    External Hard Drive Not Initialized


    Hi,

    My problem is as follows:
    External Hard Drive (1Tb WD Elements) that I've been using for a few months now has data on that I would very much like to keep.
    It was working fine until yesterday in which I tried opening a VS project which became unresponsive, tried closing everything down and turning off computer which just froze the computer leading to a hard reset (button held for 5 seconds)

    Since then the External Hard Drive has not been shown in Windows Explorer and in Disk Management is shown as "Unkown" and "Not Initialized"
    External Hard Drive Not Initialized-disk-management.png

    The Drive will still be seen correctly in Device Manager and if uninstalled it will say it has correctly installed and is ready to use.
    External Hard Drive Not Initialized-driver-installed.png

    Attempts to recover data or Initialize the drive have not worked and I have followed and looked up multiple ways to recover and other similar cases. I'm fairly certain for the data recovery the drive needs to be initialized (which just throws me an I/O error upon attempting the process) as looking at the Volume section in the properties of the device the size of the drive is listed as 0Mb.
    External Hard Drive Not Initialized-drive-volume.png

    My Last resort is taking it to a data recovery shop and hope they can grab the stuff on there.

    Any help is muchly appreciated thanks.
      My Computer
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  3. RolandJS
    Posts : 2,774
    Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
       New #2

    I'm not up on WD Elements. Did that HD come with a form of Smartware, and in that Smartware, was there a utility that would come up and either ask you to type in the user-assigned password or it would automatically type in the saved password and pass same onto The System -- and unlock the WD Elements? I ask because I'm a little familiar with WD Passport, not WD Elements.
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  4. Crumpet
    Posts : 2
    Windows 7 Professional (64 bit)
    Thread Starter
       New #3

    Hi Roland,

    There was software that came with the drive however that was optional setup things like password setup I believe. As far as I am aware there was no password in use for the drive. I was never prompted for one nor did I use the software that came with the drive.
      My Computer
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