Can the Recovery Expert Component help with this and how?

Hello,

I have an external hard drive that spins up and is recognized by the OS Disk Management as "Unknown, Not Initialized". I figured the Acronis Recovery Expert included in Disk Director 11 might help, but the disk is not included in the list of disks when I start the module.

Is there some solution to this? Do I have to initialize the hard drive before I can attempt to recover data from it (usually my first rule of thumb is not to write to the disk).

If the recovery expert can't handle this situation, what can it handle?

I'm on windows 7 64bit with the newest version of disk director 11.

Thank you,
Ben Ruppel