My essentials - retrive information

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I’ve tried all suggested solutions to connect to my external hard drive and am sure WD my essentials is corrupt as my computer will not even recognize the drive except to say disk 1 unknown not initialized - 0 bytes. I realize if I attempt to initialize I will lose all files on external hard drive. There is actually only a few files I need to retrieve. Are there any suggestions in regard to free software that will firstly identify the drive (that my computer using Windows 10 will not) and then secondly after identifying the drive allow me to retrieve files from the disk. There are numerous freeware programs that will allow retrieval of files from a corrupt disk, however they all require you to firstly to connect to my external hard drive - the drive that is not identified. Or am I just out of luck?
Any help would be appreciated.

2

Hello,

Please refer to the following KBA article: Cannot Find My WD Drive on Windows or macOS

3

Thanks - tried them all. I am hearing a constant click from drive - which to me is the click of death. I have ordered a new WD My book as this one is toast. Thanks for trying to help.

4

Whenever there is a “disk unknown not initialized” issue occurs, your hard drive may show unallocated space in Disk Management, and the data on that drive will be inaccessible or else there is another situation: there is no disk space shown in Disk Management.

Below are the 2 different methods to resolve the issue:

Method 1. Use Disk Management to fix not initialized error on an external hard drive

  1. Connect the uninitialized external hard drive to your PC.
  2. Press Win + R keys, type: diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.
  3. Find the uninitialized, unknown external hard drive with I/O device error > Right-click on it and select Initialize Disk.
  4. Then set the disk to initialize and set the disk as MBR or GPT.

After this, you may reboot your PC and keep all changes. Now, your external hard drive will be recognized and read by Windows again.

Method 2. Run CMD to repair I/O device error on not initialized external hard drive

This CMD command would erase all data on the uninitialized hard drive, which you can later restore after repairing the external hard drive not initialized, with the help of any data recovery or partition recovery software:

  1. Press Win+R > Type: diskpart and hit Enter.
  2. Type: list disk and hit Enter.
  3. Type: select disk F and hit Enter; (replace F with the drive letter of an uninitialized external hard drive).
  4. Type: clean and hit Enter.
  5. Type: convert gpt or convert mbr and hit Enter.
  6. Type: create partition primary and hit Enter.
  7. Type: format quick fs=ntfs and hit Enter.
  8. Type: assign and hit Enter.
  9. Type: exit and hit Enter.

Further, to recover your data from the affected drive you can seek the help of reliable data recovery software. Here, I suggest you to check out Stellar Data Recovery Professional Software that helps the user to recover their precious data from worst data loss scenarios.

Hope it will help!

5

I tried your suggestions and no luck. I honestly feel the hard drive has failed.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond.