The cause of the problem dictates the actions necessary to retrieve the data. Anything you add to the disk at this point has a very good chance of overwriting the data that you want to recover. The good news is that the data still remains on the hard drive, but unfortuanately you don’t have any way of accessing the Unknown / Not Initialised disk.ĭon’t reinstall the hard drive and start loading your software all over again. This isn’t always the cause though, sometimes there can be a more serious problem specific to the hard disk that causes this error.

It’s often caused by an incorrect shutdown or incorrect external hard drive removal from the system. The Unknown Disk / Not Initialised problem can sometimes occur without warning on Windows based systems. If not, you have a different problem and should NOT follow these instructions. If your system is showing a similar screen then this post is for you. In this post we address the problem shown below. The disk contains, my wedding and all my traveling photos and other docs I would like to not lose.” I tried several other recovery apps, but had no luck. Windows is not able to detect the disk space as well.

Disk Management shows the disk as: Not Initialized – Unknown Windows doesn’t recognize the disk at all. “I just moved in a new house and when I fired up my desktop PC I noticed that the system did not recognize my HDD SATA drive.

Hard drive unknown not initialized