My 200gig drive seems to have taken a shitter.. Its no longer a selectable drive. When I go into computer management, it "must initialize a disk before logical disk manager can access drive failure". Any ideas on how to perhaps recover some of the data? I'd rather not wipe it as it contains a great deal of recent photos not backed up, as well as my downloads.

doesn't sound good, a couple of options.
1. try hooking it up externally by a ide or sata to usb adapter.
2. swap the circuitboard with another identical drive
3. data recovery service ( can be expensive.)

we see a lot of people who never back up their data and as we all know drives will go bad or data will get corrupted.
the best solution going forward is o use a backup solution like trueimage or storagecraft and a external harddrive.
these two software apps make a image of the drive and will allow not only a recovery option but also a option to mount the image in vmware or vbox and run it virtualized on any pc.
it's a whole lot cheaper and less frustrating than any alternative out there.
trueimage is around 59.00 storagecraft desktop is around 99.00
storagecraft allows bare metal restores to different hardware
trueimage offers bare metal for a additional charge. it uses more resources than storagecraft.

hope this was some help.

i personally like clonezilla, and its free. its a bit lazier than just using dd to do a sector copy either to another drive, or to img.

for shit i haven't been able to mount, i've had success also with recovery using testdisk and/or photorec.

I would definitely try out swapping the PCB from an identical drive. I did it recently and it worked out. Probably a good thing I always try to buy double of HDDs I get. Ebay would be a good place to search for a cheap match.

Eh the data loss I had mostly backed up, so i'm just gonna toss this one out. I ended up having to reformat as I had multiple programs installed that were no longer there. My windows was jacked so I decided to nuke it and start over.

Now my question for you guys.. i have a gigabyte USB3 Mobo I put together last year. Do you guys just let win7 handle the motherboard drivers, or go directly to the manufacturer?

I do unless I have weird issues with onboard drivers.
for graphic and audio cards I use the manuf. drivers.
there has also been times when the MS drivers were more stable than the vendor drivers.

Acronis tools can sometimes help
but yeah
they don't last forever

HD's used to last 4+ years
newer ones with the smaller platters
I don't know

You have to figure whatever the warranty is these days, probably shortly after that it'll die.

escher:
Windows does a good job (plus they get their drivers from the respective manufacturer). Like HB said, get video card driver from GPU manufacturer (NVIDIA or AMD) and sound driver from chip maker (Soundblaster / Realtek). Some sound cards do require using product brand in-house drivers only (ASUS / Auzentech).

Anartist:

Hard drives actually use larger platters these days. That's how the size can increase. Each platter can hold more data. I think 750GB/platter is the largest for now.

I had given up trying to recover any data, and windows couldnt initialize it. So i just disconnected the cables so it wouldnt be drawing power or anything. I'll probably just get a nice big external for all the movies and shit i have hogging space.

Just reformatted and reinstalled windows as some applications were installed on that lost drive.

Just started going through something similar on one of my workstations, it either isn't seen in the BIOS or if the HDD is seen it won't boot into Windows because it's not finding components. I think the drive is starting to slowly fail.

Unless I have some nasty ass low level virus, but I would be really surprised considering I run 2 AV programs on it which scan every night and I generally don't do much on it other than watch video while I work on another machine.

Anyway, I'll be hooking it to an external case so I can hopefully get whatever's left on there, there's not much.