Is this a defective model? serious question. I have 2. theyre only a few months old. I’ve only ever used one and only at home in a climate controlled safe place and only to one laptop where theres no downloading taking place and good virus protection. its connected to a surge protector, kept dust free, etc. Yet it suddenly stopped working.
while complaining to a friend, turns out he has the same drive he just threw away for doing the same thing. I however have my work on this drive that I just pulled off my business laptop that I scrapped and was just accessing the drive again to back it up on the second one (its of obvious importance to have 2 copies of everything as my income depends on it) and the this one fails.
I need a company driven solution to fix this drive without losing any of its contents that doesn’t require paying for additional third party software for known defects as all my searching has found continuous issues with this product and i’d like to pretend this company honors its warranty and has the ability to resolve it’s own issues.
i’m operating on Windows 10. no updates have taken place.
I have tried updating drivers, uninstalling and disabling the drive. booting into safe mode, trying to relabel the drive letter, turning off the power save settings in the bus controller, tried a different compatible power cord, a different compatible usb cord.
the power light comes on but no drive noises or vibrations. my computer dings when its connected and it recognizes that it’s plugged in and its visible in device manager but it shows the drive as “not initialized” all of the sudden.
if anyone else can offer a solution, i’d be appreciative. ideallyWD themselves as I cannot reliably depend on a company with so many known reports on a product and still putting them on the shelves with inadequate support.
ive also installed WD drive utility and it wont recognize the drive.
Same problem in my 2tb wd elements, only 2-3 times used for data copy in it then placed for future use but today when i connect my drive, it partition not show in explorer. Device manager show drive in disk storage but diskmgmt show to initialise drive MBR or GPT while i m already put about 1600gb data in that drive. When click to initialise drive MBR it shows" fatal device hardware error" .
I am checked different cables and other two wd drive working fine in my pc with same cable. No clicking sound in my drive and no abnormal vibration. It power on time may be about near 20hr only. Pls help me if you have solution for my problem.
I am having the same issue. Just purchased last month and I was able to use. Storing photos on the drive. This week, it stopped showing up in file manager and cannot access.
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.
There are a few possible reasons behind the hard disk not initialized listed below. You can find out the real cause based on your own situation.
File system corruption.
Virus infection.
Bad blocks and sectors.
MBR damage.
Connection problem.
You can give a try to below mentioned 2 different methods to resolve the issue:
Method 1. Use Disk Management to fix not initialized error on external hard drive
Connect uninitialized external hard drive to your PC.
Press Win + R keys, type: diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.
Find the uninitialized, unknown external hard drive with I/O device error > Right-click on it and select Initialize Disk.
Then set the disk to initialize and set 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:
Press Win+R > Type: diskpart and hit Enter.
Type: list disk and hit Enter.
Type: select disk F and hit Enter; (replace F with the drive letter of an uninitialized external hard drive).
Type: clean and hit Enter.
Type: convert gpt or convert mbr and hit Enter.
Type: create partition primary and hit Enter.
Type: format quick fs=ntfs and hit Enter.
Type: assign and hit Enter.
Type: exit and hit Enter.
To recover your data from the drive you need the help of reliable data recovery software. There are many DIY data recovery software options available online, you can try a free version of any software to test the software & results and later you can decide which one to opt for.
