Had this internal drive in an external enclosure working fine for about 6 months, moved it one day to a new enclosure and the drive was not automatically recognized – I had moved it to a star tech 2.5 3.5 esata dock so I contacted star tech support and they suggested that i initialize the drive - tried that and no dice, moved it back to the old enclosure now the same thing is happening, drive doesn’t show up in my computer, only in device manager as 2.7 tb of unallocated space, but during the whole process I never formatted anything… my data must still be there, just need some advice how to get my data off and onto another drive to keep it safe.
“Initialization” sounds harmless but it is actually data destructive. It appears that you may have trashed the partition(s).
Which external enclosure were you originally using? Was it a WD product, eg a My Book? If so, then I believe it should be possible to manually repair the partition table. IMHO it would be preferable to do it manually because the 3TB My Books use 4KB LBAs which may pose a problem for data recovery software that expects to see 512-byte LBAs. In fact I suspect that your two enclosures may use different LBA sizes, in which case this would explain what happened. You would need to reinstall the drive in its original enclosure, though.
