HDD initializing problems

The story so far ...

I spilled a glass of cola over the keyboard of my previous laptop which caused a lot of damage to the motherboard making it an uneconomic repair. I then replaced it with the one I'm using now, but still had a few useable parts e.g. 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 750

GB HDD. While waiting for the new laptop to arrive I put the drive into an external USB caddy and attached it to my very old laptop which was overheating despite all my attempts to keep it cool. Although this only happened when tasked heavily such as converting

large video files that was just what I needed to do with some urgency. After several unsuccessful attempts which only resulted in the laptop shutting down before finishing the task I was forced to put the video conversion on the back burner until the new laptop

arrived complete with Windows 7 Home Premium already installed.

When it did I upped the RAM from 4GB to 8GB plugged in an existing external USB drive plus the one that's giving me trouble. At first neither drive would show up in 'My Computer', but eventually Windows reported that it would like to fix the first one so I

let it have a go. It took a while and a few files had been lost, but at least it was working and there was little of consequence that had been lost. In fact the replacements are more up-to-date and better than the originals! Then I plugged in the problem SATA

drive in its caddy and the results were much the same as with the first one - up to a point. The recovery app was chugging along at its usual snail's pace so I left the laptop running for 3 days and nights and it was around 3/4 of the way through the task

at which point there was an area power blackout and the damn thing decided to shut down the app to conserve battery power.

Since then I've bit the bullet, dug deep into my wallet, and upgraded to Windows 8 Pro. Unfortunately the drive still refuses to show up in 'My Computer'. I've fired up the Disk Management Console on several occasions, but it always reports a CRC error with

the drive which I first put down to it having been set to read only. Neither DMC nor Diskpart seemed to be able to clear the read only flag although I appear to have managed to do it anyway as DP's attributes command says that it's not read only now, but still

not initialized so I cannot do anything with it. Having seen a suggestion in a similar question I had a go with the CHDSK app, but it reports that, even as sole administrator, I don't have sufficient privileges to use it with or without the /f extension. Hunh?

The last few attempts have produced several events described as &quotThe IO operation at logical block address 0 for Disk 2 was retried&quot with an &quotUnexpected failure. Error code: 17@02000018&quot before those. There's also a few occasions of &quotVDS

fails to write boot code on a disk during clean operation Error code 80070017@02070008&quot showing up in the past couple of days. I would really like to have this drive working as it more than doubles my overall storage space and money is too tight at the

moment to consider buying another external drive of this kind of capacity.

Any suggestions will be more than gratefully received and, where possible, acted on. Thanks in advance.

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