Hi - new to the forums and I thank you in advance for whatever help you may offer. I'm trying to figure out what problem I have with my hard drive.

Symptoms:

1. Typical story - perfectly good drive and then one day, hard drive failed. Actually it happened after I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7.
2. No clicking or rattling on power up - it actually sounds like a normal drive.
3. In Disk Management (Windows) - the disk is now listed as "Unknown".
4. When I try to initialize the drive, it prompts me "You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it."
5. I try the MBR and GPT options and I get an error "The system cannot find the file specified".
6. When I look at the properties of the drive - the model is listed correctly - WDC WD2500JS-40SGB0. However, the volumes are listed at 0MB. It should be 250GB.

I don't think it's a read/write head or PCB controller issue. Maybe a firmware issue?

Thanks in advance for the forum's advice.

Thanks,
Woo

Try on another system : if it works there, revise configuration of your OS.
If it has the same symptoms, the drive has problems and need to be serviced.

Does the BIOS show the full capacity for your drive?

Try WD's Data Lifeguard diagnostics:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp