BleepingComputer.com: External HDD not spinning but being detected

Howdy,

I am kinda tech savy, but I am stumped. I have a seagate barracuda 7200.12 1tb hooked up to my external enclosure. It was working fine and I was actually taking care of it. A few days ago, I plugged it in and the computer recognized it, but it did not show up in my computer. I went to disk manager and found the disk, but all it says is

Disk3 unknown and not initialized.

I unplugged it, did all the usual stuff, still nothing. I plugged it in my tower with the same result. I even tried initializing it, but when I did that, I got an error message.

The disk is not ready.

Any ideas?

Sounds like one of two things that could be the cause, the first would be the enclosure's controller is bad or two the drive itself has suffered some kind of mechanical failure. If you have a way to test the hard drive in another enclosure or in a computer then I would just to rule that out.

I took the drive out of the original enclosure and hooked up it to a known good. Same thing. I also took the drive and hooked it up inside my tower and nothing new happened. Still unknown and not initialized. If the drive did suffer mechanical failure... Im guessing Im SOL...??

Yeah if its not initializing then that usually means the drive cannot read the platters, and there really isn't a way to fix it.

Crap...

There goes a terabyte down the drain. I just hope its like my other external (500g Western Digital) Did the exact same thing, and I pulled it out the other day and squeezed it and plugged it and BAM! Started working.. Real technical.

Thanks for help.