When you plug it in, the PC does recognize it in some way, though, because you can hear the sound of a new USB device being connected and see it listed as a USB device (WD Hard Drive) in the system tray. It's not visible in the explorer, though, and recovery software like Kroll OnTrack does see it as some "unrecognized drive" but can't start recovery because neither its Scan or Deep Scan features find any partitions. I've also tried the Disk Management tool that's built into Windows but it only shows it as an unrecognized drive, asking whether I want to initialize it because it claims it's not yet initialized.
What else may I try? I'd really like to get the files out of it because these are basically all my photos and videos from the past years
Having it restored by professionals, on the other hand, would be madly expensive. I've tried different USB ports, different machines (desktop PC, laptop, Mac laptop) but all to no avail. I've also thought about connecting it straight to my motherboard but after removing the enclosure, the connectors look like this so I don't even think that's possible without some soldering. Is there anything else you'd recommend that may help get the data out of the drive?