Please help with My Book 12TB, not ready to initialize.

[Perseidas]

Hi everyone,
I'm having a problem with external usb HDD WD My Book 12TB. I had it for a while and was storing on it some data and it was put aside, it has been long time I dodn't use it and when I wanted to access it this time it does not work. I'm not very savvy on this matter and I hope I can find some solution.

Description of the problem :
The hard disk does not show on folders manager.

The hard disk does show on windows disk management as : Disk 2 - Unknown - 9314GB - Not Inistialized - Unallocated. And when I click initialize it gives me the message "The device is not ready"

In WD Drive Utilities software it shows the disk "My Book" on the header with a Green checkmark. but when I click Diagnose-Run drive test it tells me "SMART status failed"

In the WD Discovery software, the drive shows up in the list when I click the tray icon, then when I click the parameters I only get "Edit password"

I tried some other software to scan the HDD (as it was recommended on some links) and they all seem to give me two kind of erroes, either "all" the sectors are bad, which I find weird given that the hdd is almost new and used so few times, or they abort the scan at the beginning saying the there are too many damages sectors.

So what do you think ?

[Zibri]

If you don't care about the data inside,
download WD UTILITIES from wd website
do a security erase. (you will lose all data)
then wait that the drive settels (usually in a few seconds/minutes)
and then powerdown and disconnect the drive from usb.
after that, reconnect it and you might be able to reformat it.

[fzabkar]

If you can't retrieve the SMART report from the drive, then it sounds as if the drive may have an internal fault. BTW, the reported capacity reflects a 10TB drive, not 12TB.

[Zibri]

SMART can fail for many reason expecially on windows and some controllers.

To be sure, connect the drive to LINUX or to an Oracle VirtualBox VM running linux and check it there before proceding.

Also, if the drive has been used outside the WD enclosure, the enclosure might not want to talk to it anymore.
To solve that you must reflash the usb bridge (enclosure) with a generic firmware.

To do so is very simple but there is no going back unless you have a FULL backup of the winbond W25X20 chip and probably some data needs to be wrtitten on the disk for the firmware of the enclosure to authorize it.