I can see my external hard drive in device manager, but not able to initialize i

Chianger

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Nov 6, 2012
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I have an external western digital essential 2.0 hard drive. I can see if in Device Manager, however it doesn't show up in File Explorer. When I go into Disk Management, I can see the external hard drive, however it shows the external hard drive as an unknown and it does not allow for the option to initialize it. Any ideas how I can fix this problem?

Thanks!
 

Chianger

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Nov 6, 2012
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According to your description, we can roughly know that your drive may be corrupted, perhaps because of the virus attack or other reasons.
If your western drive is a new one and have not saved anything, you can directly format it by right clicking it on "disk management" and selecting "format" on the list.
If you have used it for a long time and have stored a great amount of data there, you are supposed to restore it at first with the help of a recovery program and then format it by using the same way mentioned above.
And as to the recovery utility, you can select a reliable one according your needs.
I would recommend you to read these related articles before you make your decision:

Tested Data Recovery Freeware
Not Format Error
Format Recovery

I hope my words can help you a lot.

Thanks so much for a quick reply.

It's an older western digital drive, had it for about 2 years. I'll take a read of the articles you posted.

Cheers!
 
@Chianger, be aware that initialisation is data destructive. Do you really want to do this? If so, then you don't need any data recovery software.

That said, it appears that your drive may have an internal fault rather than a file system problem.

What do the following utilities report?

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

UVCView talks to the USB-SATA bridge board inside the enclosure while HD Sentinel tries to retrieve information about the actual HDD behind the bridge.
 

Chianger

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Thanks. Yeah, not keen on initialization as there is some data on it that I would like to keep.
 

Chianger

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Thank you
 

bobbo123

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I had this exact problem on my Seagate 3 TB Drive about 2 years old. Started acting up about 2 weeks ago, I ran checks that said my HD was just fine but such checks seem unreliable. I thought I was developing "bad sectors" and fixed them after backing my data up. Before, I could get the HD back on line by assigning a Drive Letter to it. Tongiht, I got this "Not Initialized" message. I tried the Miniaide Software to no benefit and even finally decided to Initialize a new partition. The computer management console would not accept the command.

WHAT TO DO????

For grins--I connected the hard drive using different power and usb cables. Its working like a charm now. Glad I thought to do something so basic........ now...... I wonder if one of those cables was "just loose?"

You gotta love it. TOMS HARDWARE: THANK YOU for this forum.