Removed D4 diode, 1.0 TB Caviar Green now powers up but not detected when connected to PC

@Whopper, please DON’T format the drive. Formatting is data destructive. If you are able to recover your data afterwards, it will be in spite of formatting your drive, not because of it.

That said, the drive looks OK, but I suspect that you haven’t told us everything. When a drive shows up as “not initialised” or “unallocated”, it means that there is no partition information in sector 0. This could be because you have deleted the partitions, or it could be that Windows cannot make sense of the information.

Is the drive a My Book Essentials? If so, then the data will have been encrypted by the USB-SATA bridge board inside the enclosure. If you remove the drive from its enclosure and connect it via SATA or via a different enclosure, then Windows will see gibberish.

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