how Disk Management scans/registers Drives?

[zapp22]

friends this relates to a challenging 'dead' drive I'm needing data from.
I've worked on many before and as you know most of the time you can force a drive to spinup and cough up at least sOME data.... every now and then I get a harder case.

dealing with this caused a question in my mind:
I have the bad drive [PATA notebook drive -seagate momentus] attached to a usb bridge device that I use for all such issues. in this case, when I do a fresh start, with the external bridge powered up before cold boot, once 7 Ultimate gets coherent I run disk Management - the scan will popup the box saying "this disk needs to be initialized" and I give it the go - it gives "device not ready". that does not surprise me since the drive seems to only spin [motor runs] sporadically.
What I'd like to know is: what is the applet "seeing" - what is it in disk management that recognizes there is something akin to a Disk out there on one of the device ports?

the followon question would then be: what low-level tool can I use that can attempt communication with the drive's firmware to try to get a spinup command or something to give me a chance???

I have seen an old macintosh drive - WD if I recall - that was in similar state. sometimes I could get a read via the usb bridge, but no data. finally after days of trying I gradually was able to start reading - it would spin very slowly and erratically, taking literally days to complete the forensic tool's scan....

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Hiyya zapp now I take it all you want is data? I have used a Ubuntu boot to drag off data from drives that appear to be dead and / or the password is lost.

All you need do is make the Ubuntu boot disk set the BIOS to boot from the optical and in Ubuntu the drive should appear at the top of the other listings click on it and then I think it is the second tab down on the left (been a long time since I used it last) that will access the drive data by digging down into it > C; > Users > "name" > > docs pics etc.