[2025] How to Recover Data from Drive Not Initialized

Why is your drive not initialized?

Generally speaking, your drive should be initialized when you use it. But sometimes your drive is recognized as uninitialized and your data is lost. So why is your hard drive not initialized and your data lost? There are some common symptoms and reasons for them.

If you receive a message that shows “disk unknown not initialized", accompanied by "unallocated", maybe it is caused by MBR (Master Boot Record) corruption. MBR is the first sector on a GPT or MBR disk, which stores information about loading Windows and partition of the disk. Once it is damaged, your drive will show as “Not Initialized”.

If your drive just shows “Unknown, Not Initialized” and there are no details about it, then it may caused by physical issues like connection errors, or disk driver issues.

Since your drive is not initialized and data is lost, do you want to learn an effective way to recover data from a drive not initialized? Continue reading this post and it will help you with this.

How to recover data from drive not initialized

To recover data from hard drive not initialized, you can consider solving the “Not initialized” issue first. Here we prepared some solutions to different situations, you can choose one according to the symptom you met.

▶ Solution 1. Initialize your drive

If you want to recover not initialized hard drive, an obvious solution is to initialize your drive first. The first method applies to fix drives that are not initialized and unallocated. Here are the easy steps to initialize your drive:

1. Press the Windows and X keys together to choose Disk Management.

2. Locate your drive, then right-click on it and choose Initialize Disk in the pop-up window.

3. Choose a partition type for your drive. GPT is the best choice now. Then click OK.

4. After that, you can use normal ways to recover lost data from hard drive.

▶ Solution 2. Check the drive connection

If you receive the “Unknown, Not Initialized” message and want to recover data from an uninitialized disk, maybe it is caused by your drive connection. For this, you can follow the tips below to try to fix it:

• Change the USB port for your drive.

• Change another cable for your drive.

• Connect your drive to another computer.

▶ Solution 3. Send your drive for manual repair

If you are told that your drive is “Unknown, Not Initialized”, There is a high probability of physical damage, which can cause serious storage media problems. If the above methods can not solve your problem, then you may want to consider sending the drive for manual repair to avoid more serious damage.

▶ Solution 4. Recover data from uninitialized disk

There is actually a more direct and easier way to recover data from uninitialized disk here. 

AOMEI FastRecovery is a professional data recovery tool, that can help you recover over 200 types of data, including documents, pictures, videos, audio, etc. The tool recognizes uninitialized hard drives, finds target files through Deep Scan, and recovers them for free. The best thing is that it can be done in just 3 steps and is suitable for beginners.

Step 1. On the main menu, the uninitialized drive will be shown as Lost Partition. Select the target and click "Scan".

Step 2. It will start Deep Scan automatically to find your Old Partition Files and More Missing Files. In addition, you can try Filter or Search to locate the files quickly.

Step 3. After that, select your data and click Recover to recover files you need.

Wrapping things up

When your disk is not initialized, you will not be able to access the files stored on it. For the safety of your data, you should use the methods mentioned in this article to initialize the disk as soon as possible, or use AOMEI FastRecovery to scan and recover data from the uninitialized disk.