Recovering data from a faulty external HDD

[Humbug]

I seem to have a faulty Western Digital Elements external hard drive. I have tried it on a few different PCs, no luck.

• The device itself is detected by the OS
• It is powering up and windows even allows me to eject the USB device as usual
• However no volume appears in file manager for me to browse

When I open disk management I get the following message.

"You must initialize a disk before logical disk manager can access it"

And it asks me to select a partition style, either MBR or GPT.

 

At this point I always click cancel, because I don't want it to partition or format my disk as I guess that will erase my data.

 

Any ideas?

[kelvinhall05]

What OS is detecting it? If it's Windows, try it on a Linux PC. If it's a Linux PC and it's still not being detected, you might be screwed. 

[Humbug]

Just now, kelvinhall05 said:

What OS is detecting it? If it's Windows, try it on a Linux PC. If it's a Linux PC and it's still not being detected, you might be screwed. 

Tried it on both Linux and windows, same issue.

[kelvinhall05]

3 hours ago, Humbug said:

Tried it on both Linux and windows, same issue.

Yeah, hard drive might not be saveable. If there's something important on it, send it to some data recovery service.