Initialize a hard drive in win 7?

[jbourne84]

I am trying to recover what once was my primary hard drive(Seagate barracuda 320gb SATA), i heard using an external enclosure can sometimes work. i bout a USB external enclosure, put in the hard drive and connected to my laptop (also running win7). it came up and said new hardware added & installed sucessfully. It is not showing up in My Computer so i went to the disk manager. It is listed as unknown device and says it needs to be intialized.

Can i initialize it without erasing everything?

 

[acer0169]

Not really.

If it doesn't allow you to assign a drive letter to the drive, I'm pretty sure initialising the drive would ask for a format (though I could be wrong).

What was the issue with the hard drive? I mean.. why are you having to do it through a caddy? Did something go wrong on your computer?

 

[house70]

If it asks you to format it while initialising, just cancel it.

 

[jbourne84]

the hard drive used to boot fine until the day i tried adding a second seagate barracuda (500gb) drive. I plugged it in, turned on the computer and the boot would stall at a blank black screen.
I took the new drive out,(so it should have been back to normal) rebooted and then kept getting an error about not finding a boot device. It was listed in the BIOS but all the values were zero.

now im trying to recover my data off of that original drive and reinstall windows on a new hard drive.