I'm trying to access files from a friend's external hard disk which had stopped showing up in 'My Computer' on his XP machine.
I removed the drive (500Gb Seagate SATA drive) and installed it in my Windows 7 PC. The drive is detected by Disk Management but listed as 'Not initialized'. It pops up a 'Initialize Disk' window asking if I want to initialize with either MBR or GPT partitions styles.
If I go ahead and let Windows initialize the disk, will this make the data unrecoverable? What is the safest way to proceed here?