WD Elements 14Tb not recognized

WD External Drives My Passport Wireless
1

I have an almost new (less than a year old) WD Elements 25A3 1030 and today with win10 laptop the disk does not appear in File explorer and is not recognized. I tried to use another pc with the same result.
Only Windows disk management see it, but it says not initialized and does not give any info on its size, though it reports correctly its name above.

The disk management utility tends to ask me to initialize it and pops up with the window. I am unsure on what to do.
It has the original partition (a single one) in NTFS, and I fear to lose it with all my files.
Three questions:

  1. Can you give advice on what is the best practice in this case?
  2. Do you have an utility more targeted to re-initialize the disk (I tried AOMEI Partition Assistant - rebuilt MBR - with no results, although it says “success”).
  3. If I initialize it with Windows the partition will be lost?

I do not why the disaster occurred. My guess is that the laptop attempted to boot from the WD Elements (I attached it before booting in windows, and it was a long boot time in this occasion) and this may have caused the corruption of the first sectors. Before I did not have perceivable problems. I tried to use some recovery software like r-studio, but without initialization they do nothing.

Thanks for any advice.

2

Hi @science2002,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

3

Thanks for your suggestion.
I did not open anything. This also because I did not find strange noises in the HD nor it was completely silent. As I said, I just tried once to rebuilt the Mbr (in this case GPT), with the tool that was suggested in another post even here.

4

Whenever there is “disk unknown not initialized” issue occurs, your hard drive may show unallocated space in Disk Management, and the data on which 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, in order to recover data from the affected drive, you may need the help of reliable data recovery software. Here, I suggest you to check out Stellar Data Recovery Professional Software to recover your data from the affected drive.

Hope it helps!