Drive Not Listed In My Computer

I have a WD 250GB external hard drive that I’ve had for a few years now and it’s worked great till now. I plugged it into my laptop that runs Ubuntu and now it doesn’t seem to work on that or my Windows Vista Ultimate. I’ve been reading online that it should be listed in the Computer Management and it is.  When I browse to Disk Drives it is listed as “WD 2500 BMV External USB Device” but I Don’t know what to do with that… Heres the wired part when I go to Disk Management it is listed as “Disk 1.” Under that it says “Unknown 232.89GB Not Initialized” Then were it lists the partitions it shows the 232.98 GB as unallocated space… When I click on the Disk 1 and hit Initialize Disk it comes up ith an error after a minute or two that says “The Drive Cannot Find The Sector Required.”  I need help, I need the files that are on there and I don’t really know what to do.

Heres a screenshot of it

Thanks,

Caleb

Well you can see your Hard drive in the disk management window, so try to use a data recovery program; Recuva has worked for me in the past. If you’re able to recover your files then try to write zeros with Data Lifeguard Diagnostics, and then finally formatted from disk management.

Write Zeros with Data Lifeguard Diagnostics

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1211/session/L2F2LzEvc25vLzEvdGltZS8xMzI3MDkxMTMwL3NpZC9Fc0RzZUVPaw%3D%3D#windlg

Reformat you HDD from Disk Management

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3865/session/L2F2LzIvc25vLzEvdGltZS8xMzI3MDkxMzk3L3NpZC9Fc0RzZUVPaw%3D%3D

If you need the files then stop there. Prior to initializing you will need to recover the files with a software. 

I’ve used Minitool Data Recovery but there’s many other options.

Something that might help in data recovery is a Linux Live CD. Just download and burn and boot from that. It could also be corruption and something like TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk PhotoRec is also there I’ve seen that recommended also.

Joe