My 13-month old Fujitsu N5050 Lifebook had a Toshiba 60 GB HDD. After
getting several SMART warnings on boot-up that the HDD was about to
fail, I bought a Hammer Backup storage system w/Hitachi HDD that uses
Dantz "One-Button" Retrospective s/w. Backed up the Toshiba HDD then
the Toshiba HDD failed and the notebook wouldn't boot. Removed the
Toshiba HDD from the notebook and replaced it with the Hitachi HDD
from the Hammer and got going again with reloading the XP Pro OS and
several other s/w. (There were probably easier ways to recover but it
worked for me).

Put the "damaged" Toshiba HDD into a Hotdrive connected to my notebook. I can
see all the files and folders w/Stellar Phoenix s/w so no data has
been lost and all the disk is still there (as far as I can see).
(During an SP scan, I got errors on sectors 6600-6603). However, the
Toshiba HDD is still not recognized by the notebook "My Computer" so it
seems like there is some physical damage on the disk at the
initialization point.

Question: are there any s/w utilities that can be used to "reset" the
initialization of the disk so that it is recognized by My Computer and
so I can re-use it at least as secondary storage? TIA, Kevin

If there was anything to be called a "miracle product", Spinrite 6 would be it.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
I used an earlier version back in the day, and it restored a clunky,
failing drive to useable condition. I then was able to backup the
drive with no problem. I probably could have kept using it with no
problems, but I just replaced it since it was quite outdated by
today's standards (4gb)
I've heard nothing but good things come out of it, if Spinrite can't
fix it, good luck :)

Since you've already backed it up there shouldn't be any fear of data
loss. So, what my advice is to go to Toshiba support website, which is
csd.toshiba.com and download the hard disk support utility called
Toshiba Disk Manager (which is a customized version of our Good Old
DM) and run the zero fill option in that. It'll remove and recreates
the defect sector lists, MBR etc.
I advice you to replace your working drive with this one (to make sure
you don't make mistakes while selecting the drive letter) and do it
from your laptop itself.

It's going to take 1-2 hours to complete the zero filling process. I
hope this would solve your problems.

mvdxb-ga; my notebook is a Fujitsu not a Toshiba.