How to Recover Data from Drive Not Initialized Easily

Why is your drive not initialized?

Generally speaking, your drive should be initialized when you get to use it. But sometimes your drive is recognized as uninitialized and your data is lost. So why is your hard drive not initialized and why is 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 disk. Once it is damaged, your drive will show as “Not Initialized”.

If your drive just shows “Unknown, Not Initialized” and there is no details about it, then it may caused by physical issues like connection errors, 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 drive  not initialized? Continue reading this post and it will help you for 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. And the first method applies to fix drive that shows 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 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. Use a recovery tool (Easiest)

If your uninitialized disk shows Unallocated in Disk Management, the easiest way is using a recovery tool to help you like AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. You can get it in Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista/2000. Compared with other tools, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional has many advantages like:

● Easy to use: It provides user-friendly interface and simple operation steps.
● Functionality: It supports multiple device types including HDD, SSD, external hard drive, flash drive, RAID, Virtual disk partition, etc.
● Compatibility: It can work well with Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista/2000.
● Various utilities: It supports to recover deleted partition from different situations. And you can convert MBR and GPT without deleting partitions.

Now, click on this Download Demo button to download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional on your computer. Then follow the simple guideline to recover partition from your drive using the Partition Recovery feature in it:

1. Click on the Partition Recovery Wizard option on the left menu and choose your drive in the list. Then click Next to continue.

2. Choose Fast Search for the first time, which will cost less time. If your data cannot be found, try Full Search then.

3. When the search finishes, choose the lost partition and then click Proceed.

4. Once you see the congratulations page, you can click Finish to exit the window.  Then your lost partition will reappear in your drive.

Solution 4. 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.

Bonus tip: Recover data via an easy tool

If you have fixed your drive luckily, and want to recover data from it, here we recommend an easy data recovery tool - MyRecover. You can download and run it on Windows 11/10/8/7/Server. And it can help you recover more than 200 types of data, including pictures, videos, audio, etc. If your drive is formatted or attacked by virus, it can also help you to recover data from your drive.

Just click this Download Software button and follow the 3-step guideline to recover data from drive via MyRecover:

1. After connecting your drive to computer, hover the mouse over the drive, and click Scan to let it be scanned.

2. Then you can see your deleted files and other missing files after Quick Scan/Deep Scan automatically.

3. Then, check the scanning result. Select a new location to store your recovered files. After that, click on the Recover X files button to begin the data recovery task.

Wrapping things up

We believe you have learned how to recover data from drive not initialized after looking through this post. You’d better try a professional data recovery tool like AOMEI Partition Assistant to help you fix your drive first. And we also provide a guideline to initialize your drive. If you want to recover data form drive, there is another easy data recovery tool called MyRecover and you can try it.