Visual Disk

[EvanDavis]

I have a 80gig Hitachi drive in a USB enclosure. It has been working fine up until last night.
When I power up my PC, I can hear it spin up and the red light is on,but I can't see it in Computer. It shows up in BIOS as a Visual Disk and the same in Computer Management as a visual disk. But says not initialized

When I go to initialize it, a box appears as in the image below.

No matter which option I choose, I get Incorrect function.

I have tried it on two other computers and get the same thing. All are running Windows 7 Ultimate.

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

Same size disk, different manufacturer, same USB enclosure setup.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...itialize/11207b50-433b-4156-bcaf-a1c55cc3788d

Based on the fact that it mentions formatting the disk, that's probably not much of an option with data on it.

Have a look at the Hitachi disk tools. There is probably something there that can help you determine if the drive has failed. A fitness test program is available. You may need to pull the drive from the enclosure and connect it in the PC to actually test it. I am not positive whether it will support a USB enclosure.

http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

 

[EvanDavis]

Problem solved

Many e-mails to HItachi (in hope they would send me a new drive ) No luck on that though. They linked me to a few tools which did nothing, then suggested Irun CMD and DISKPART, selected the disk and ran " clean all " Restarted PC and drive is showing again. Createda new simple volume and ran Recuva later and got all of my data back with exception of a few pictures. But otherwise everything I had on there was still intact, so I am pretty happy bunny. Thanks for the help

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

interesting. sounds like a partition issue. I hate dealing with USB drives and Windows. For this very reason.

 

[EvanDavis]

interesting. sounds like a partition issue. I hate dealing with USB drives and Windows. For this very reason.

The fella I was dealing with did mention it could be a disk write error that was stopping it from initialising and would best be to format the disk. Thank god for Recuva and Microsofts crappy formatting system which enabled me to get most of the data back

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

Well, that sounds about right. Any time I have seen issues with USB drives (jumps included), it is due to delayed write failure. Basically, what this means is that when you do a copy/cut - paste, the system caches the data to accommodate for various write speeds on the device, and then writes the data at it's own speed to minimize impact on the system. I have not seen many actual HD issues, with exception to the Lacie drives, that have the same issues as a USB jump does.

You can test this by plugging in a jump drive and copying some data to it. You only have to use a small document. Watch as it copies to the jump, the light will flash a bit. (larger files or data will assist in prolonging the time that is used to use the delayed write process. As Windows closes the copy dialogue, you can still see the jump drive flash as data is writing. If you pull the jump immediately after the copy dialogue goes away, you will find that the file probably didn't copy to the jump. And you will get a "delayed write fail" popup from the task bar/notification area.