Serial ATA removed from case, not showing up with docking station

[mr_mre]

I have a 1TB Western Digital External HD (P/N WDBAAF0010HBK-01) that was working perfectly last night, then all of a sudden it wouldn't show up anywhere, not even in device manager. The micro USB was extremely lose so I removed the external casing, finding a normal Serial ATA hard drive. I went out and purchased a hard drive docking station, plugged in the drive, and nothing showed up in my computer. It did show up in the disk management, however disk management said I needed to initialize the HD before using it. I know initializing it deletes everything and that's not an option, I need the files on it. I'm using RecoverMyFiles v3.9.8.6472 right now and it hasn't found anything yet. Is there any way of turning this thing on besides RecoverMyFiles?

-sorry for the book.

 

[Hawkeye22]

You can try EASUS Partition recovery to see if you can recover the partition, or possibly try easus Data Recovery Wizard?

http://www.easeus.com/

 

[mr_mre]

so it has nothing to do with not being mounted correctly or anything like that? i was hoping that recovery software wouldn't even need to be used.

 

[Hawkeye22]

If disk management says it needs initialized, then it thinks there is no data on the drive, including partitions. Of course, if you do initialize it, you will lose your data.

If you have any open sata ports on your motherboard, you could try connecting it there and see if it shows up properly in disk managemnt.