catastrophic failure (CCTV Drive)

[Larry Pham]

What was I thinking!!

My sister asked me if I can help her extract some critical video off her 
AVTEC 760 CCTV digital recorder for her upcoming court case and I really 
want to help her so I agreed.

The recorder has no physical way to offload the video  so I  opened up 
the unit  and  took the hard drive out.  I hooked it up  to my PC and  
the drive did not show up. I checked in computer management and the 
drive is listed but says it's not initialized. Don't ask me why I did it 
but I hoped after I initialized the drive that the videos would appear 
and I can just pull them off onto my PC. It didn't work!! :(

After putting the drive back into the recorder all the videos are gone! 
Because the AVTech machine uses it's own proprietary format , the  
recovery software I have researched can not recover something it can not 
see in the first place.

Is there any way to undo a drive initialization? I don't care about 
extracting the videos and more, I just really need to undo the 
initialization so the videos can be played on the machine again.

Desperation is setting in and I can only hope someone here might be able 
to help.

Larry