NTFS HDD not reading

Hello,
I know there are lots of similar problems on this forum- many of which I have read through and attempted to apply their solutions, but to no effect. If it looks like there is another thread you know of, please redirect me and I'm sorry for wasting your time :)

Essentially I have a 1.5 TB Western Digital External USB HDD that I stuck inside my desktop a while back. It worked fine for ages and then I upgraded my OS to Windows 8 (from 7). I don't think this caused the problem but it happened around then.

• Now the icon is blank,
• it comes up with 0 bytes under properties,
• windows partition manager says that it needs to be initialized
• If I double click on it windows tells me I do not have permission to access the drive (I have checked the read write settings and ensured I have full access).

I thought maybe its a MBR error (as it was previously a USB hdd I thought that may have stuffed it) so I used test disk to check it (testdisk claims that there is nothing wrong with the MBR file). However testdisk does only show one partition on the drive (I never had multiple partitions but I assumed there would at least be a backup partition or something).


Weird thing is I can open the drive on Ubuntu (although sometimes it takes a long time) and access the data from there. I realise that if I simply reinitialized the drive it would work again, but I don't have enough space on my other drive to back all the stuff up off it.


Any suggestions in how to get windows to open this drive again would be great.


Cheers,


Whitecliff