Hard drive not initialized and has data on it

martial315 · 08 Jul 2015

If anyone can help me figure this out i am stumped. Pictures to help explain my situation. I have 3 hard drives that are not showing up in my computer but is showing up in Device Manager. They show up as "Disk 1 Unknown Not initialized". I cannot loose the data on the drives. in Diskpart it shows only as a drive and says 0gb meanwhile 2 are 320gb and the other is 2tb. Also i am connecting them via USB because they are from my desktop and my desktop wont boot off of them and neither will my laptop through bios. The drives also will not show up in Partition Wizard. The drive is spinning and has never been dropped. Also the drives do not show up in disk part as volumes. I need all of the data off the drives if possible. Thanks!

Lady Fitzgerald · 08 Jul 2015

Someone else will have to help you with getting your data off your drives (or, more likely, you will have to pay a recovery specialist well north of $1k per drive to attempt to recover the data with no guarantees of success, the option I would recommend since trying to recover the data yourself may permanently lose otherwise recoverable data) but, in the future, you need to backup your data to avoid this problem in the future. All drives will fail, some sooner than later, often without warning. The only way to reasonably ensure your data is safe is for it to exist in at least three places, such as on the computer, on an onsite backup, and on an offsite backup (I have five backups per drive, two onsite, two in my credit union safe deposit box, and on a paid cloud backup site). Backups need to stay disconnected from the computer except when updating the backup and need updating frequently since data not backed up usually can't be recovered. An acceptable low end plan would be an onsite external drive for each drive in use. A cloud backup plan, such as Carbonite.com, CrashPlan, or Backblaze (I use Carbonite) is an easy, fairly inexpensive way to get an offsite backup and keep it up to date (Carbonite starts at $60/month, the price I pay, and the others are similarly priced). The only caution is to use a cloud backup service, not a cloud storage service.

ThrashZone · 08 Jul 2015

Hi and welcome to SevenForums,
Have you been testing windows 10tp ?

Please give us some more details on what was done to before this happened and how long has it been since you accessed the drives
We're assuming these are all internal drives ?