HDD not recognized by computer

[trevor7909]

Hello!

I have a Toshiba external hard drive which has had some issues lately. It is not recognized in "My Computer" and I am unable to access any of the data on it. In Disk Management it appears under a black bar in the Disk 1 row.

When I try to initialize the drive in Disk Management I get an error saying: (Data error) cyclic redundancy check. I have also tried renaming the drive through DISKPART but that didn't seem to solve anything either.

The attached screencap is what I get in disk management.
Is there an alternative way I can boot the disk?

 

[leo2kp]

That particular error is usually indicative of a dead HDD. What I would do is remove the disk from the enclosure and plug it directly in to a SATA port. You'll get more control over the drive that way. Then, if the drive spins up and the BIOS will initialize it, go ahead and try to get Windows to work with it. If not, you can look at data recovery options like Zero Assumption Recovery or TestDisk. ZAR is free to use up to 2GB of data, but TestDisk might work too, but has a much higher learning curve and is more for rebuilding file systems vs recovering data from a bad disk.