**I'm sorry, I don't know what happened to the title. I typed it to read External Hard Drives Require Initializing. Unfortunately, I cannot see how to change it, nor how to delete the post and start a new one.**
I have a 2 Tbyte HDD (WesternDigital) that was originally installed in a "MyBook". The drive was damaged by a failing processor shutting down several years ago. At the time, the drive indicated that the data could be recovered.
Finances being what they are, I was unable to purchase a new drive until today (in this case, a 4 Tbyte HDD). I have a disk cloner (basically, it is like a box with ports for two hard drives, which can either be used to clone the contents of one drive onto the other, or allow one to use two drives as external hard drives through the same time USB jack).
The cloner and drives appear to be working properly. However, neither of these drives shows up on the list of hard drives. When I checked Disk Management, it says that I must initialize the drives before Local Disk Management can access them. This is logical.
Also, Disk Management gives two options -- Master Boot Record (MBR) and GUID Partition Table (GPT). I do not understand what these options mean (though MBR is ticked by default).
However, it is too many years since I dealt with any of this, and, as I am 70 years old, I suspect it will not come back. My question is, will initializing the 2 Tbyte drive (the drive whose data I very much hope to recover) destroy the data on it? If so, is there anything I can do that will allow me to access the data as is, so that I can transfer the recoverable data to the 4 Tbyte drive?
I created an analysis of the PC using SPECCY, as directed, and that is attached to this post. The damaged 2 Tbyte drive is outlined in red, the new 4 Tbyte drive is outlined in yellow. If there is any other data that I should provide, please let me know.
Thank you all for your time, and for your help. Both are very much appreciated.
-- DMB
Attached Files
Edited by dmburkus, 23 September 2023 - 07:35 AM.