How to recover data without initializing???

If Windows won't mount the drive, and you need the data, you will need to weigh the need for the data against the cost of recovery.  There are some utilities that can attempt to read drives that Windows won't - Ontrack's Easy Recovery is one -- but anything you do can reduce the chances of professional recovery, if that becomes necessary.  It costs at least a few hundred dollars to recover a drive - one reasonably priced, well regarded recovery service is Gillware (www.gillware.com).

Thanks for your reply.  Can you tell me in simple terms why my desktop won't recognize or mount the external drive?  I had no trouble doing this with another dead laptop drive.

The partition might be in inactive state. You can activate it using the disk part commands or recover the data using recovery software like Remo Recover

Did you manage to sort out your data recovery. With most laptops there is more than one partition, such as boot, recovery and also your data parturition. I would suggest not altering these partitions if you want to have any chance of getting your data back.

Have you enquired to have it recovered professionally. Or is the data not that critical for you.

No, I rescued 2 other hard drives but not this one.  The solution is too expensive via store, and too complicated to try at home.

Have a look at the costs on Dataquest International Ltd website they may be more cost effective.

Yes ... it's too expensive and I believe the data is just personal photos.  

Well, it is not possible to recover data without initializing, so first of you need to initialize a disk by following the below steps:

• First of all, connect the uninitialized disk to your computer.
• Next, press Windows + R keys to open the Run command and then type there MSC and then hit the Enter key.
• You have to then find the uninitialized or unknown USB flash drive with I/O device error and then right-click on it and then select the option ‘Initialize Disk’.
• After this, you have to set the disk to initialize and then set the drive as MBR or GPT.

After initializing a disk without losing data, now you can easily get your files back by using any recommended third-party data recovery tool. Good luck…