Question: Hi there.
Woke up this morning to my media/file server being unresponsive. It is an older ThinkServer TS140 that’s just running a Win 7 install.
After forcefully rebooting it, it kept hanging/freezing up on the Intel Rapid storage raid config screen. Unable to do anything, even access BIOS, I discovered by trial and error method of disconnecting drives that my “Seagate Archive HDD ST8000AS0002” seemed to be the culprit. HDD datasheet
I managed to get it to boot with the drive by unplugging the other drives/RAIDs(except boot drive ofc). However the drive was not detected in windows and Disk Management displays it as “Unknown”, “Not Initialized” and having only 3.86GB Unallocated space(Its an 8TB drive).
Pulled it out and put it in my desktop (no problems booting with it) and Disk Management shows the same thing:
Answer:you would need a disk scanning software or command to check disks outside of Windows, before it starts.
maybe try to run data recovery software like Recuva or Data Recovery Wizard, something that may be able to initialize and access the data for recovery if the drive is actually failing.