Unable To Initialize Hdd Question

Hey all!! A few months ago I picked up a box of stuff at an auction, all network and pc related bits and bobs. Included are a dozen or so Toshiba Hard Drives (2.5inch 640gb drives) that were used as hot-swappable storage for a surveillance system or dictation system (that's the explanation I was given at least.

I dropped one into my camera DVR at home, no issues, works beautifully.

Then I tried to connect a couple to set them up as expanded storage for work (I do a lot of graphics/graphic design work for marketing) and use a 'hacked' Seagate adapter (started as an external HDD for backups, the drive died spectacularly so I salvaged the connection)

I can get the drives (2 so far) to show up in the disk manager, but not in explorer, and when I open disk manager, it tells me that they are not initialized, and it gives me an I/O error when I try to. I have used testdisk in the past and tried it for this, but gives me a read error. I've swapped out my cable with no change, tried different usb ports, same. Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how to essentially read and reformat these drives to make them usable again. I did search, and actually signed up when I couldn't find ay answers so I could ask you guys.

(Yes, I am a former member as well, I was 187MDK back in the old days, new decade, new me and all that. LOL

 

Plug one of the drives into a SATA port, then try one of these disk partition utilities on Major Geeks:

Aomei Partition Assistant
EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition
Macrorit Disk Partition Free Edition
MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition

If the utility is unable to erase/partition the drive and you get an error, post it here so we can look into it.

 

Let me see what I can work out, I'm getting ready to build a new tower for my home office, but generally work from a laptop which is why I connect with the USB adapter.

 

You can try it with a USB-to-SATA adapter. I recommended plugging the drive into a SATA port to eliminate the possibility that the adapter is the problem.

 

I've got MiniTool running as we speak, I will let you all know what the results are.