Peter Jason wrote:
I have plugged in a 1TB HDD and Windows Explorer
does not show it.

In Disk Management it shows up as "Disk 3" and
unallocated.

No amount of right clicking will induce the
"Initialize Disk" wizard to appear.

Is there anything else to do?

Peter

This program will display the primary partition entries.

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...s/PTEDIT32.zip

Unzip it. Right click on ptedit32.exe and select "Run as Administrator". Otherwise,
the program will give "error 5".

For it to work, I expect it needs to find the signature bytes 0xAA55 down at the
end of sector 0 of the disk. So if the disk truly wasn't initialized, you're likely
going to get a complaint from ptedit32 when it looks for disk 3.

If the signature bytes are present, then you get to see the four 16 byte partition
entries.

You'll notice in this picture, there is a drop-down menu to select which disk, at
the top.

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/files/dell-tbl.gif

If all four fields were completely zeroed out, it would mean there aren't any
primary partitions (yet).

ptedit32 can actually write to the disk, and you can make changes to the partition
table. I would not advise that, without more research first. I've swapped table
entries, as an example of something you can do with it. If you move a boot.ini
based OS (i.e. swap table entries), you need to edit boot.ini after swapping entries
or it will no longer boot. You can also delete a partition, by simply zeroing out a
table entry, but the partition is still intact and easy to recover with "testdisk"
program. So you could term such an operation, "hiding" a partition. If you forgot
about the hidden partition, and defined a new one, then the old partition would
be ruined. (Data recovery utilities, could still find some of the files. Doing
a "Secure Erase" gets everything, including the MBR.)

*******

The other option, is to transfer sector 0 of the hard drive, into a small 512 byte
file, and examine it with a hex editor. And that will tell you what is going on
but require you to do your own analysis.

This article, gives some hints about the contents of sector 0 (512 bytes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

0-439 boot code (when an OS is installed on the disk)
440-443 Disk Signature
444-445
446-509 Four 16 byte partition entries, displayed by PTEDIT32
510-511 55AA (meaning, the MBR has been written with something valid)

HTH,
Paul