hard drive is no longer initialized windows 7

I searched for the title of this thread, "hard drive is no longer initialized windows 7" and found a thread here where I am following these very good instructions by jumanji:

disk 1 is unknown, not initialized, unallocated

I could not directly download the software mentioned, but at the site linked I was able to find the software: pwfree91.exe

I am scanning now, its been scanning for a couple hours, it seems it may scan for days, not sure if it will display here or attach.

You can see how much is scanned and how much is to go, at this rate it will literally take days.

All the numbers seem correct, size and how much is used, etc, that is encouraging.

It seems the data I am trying to recover from this internal drive is in fact there.

Is this the recommended track still today, the one mentioned in jumanji's post linked above?

jdod

The scan was creeping along, then I looked away and now of the total above, it has scanned 6,826,752 sectors. Faster progress for some reason.

Now over 48 million sectors, definitely going faster. Now it reads 1%!

No, I won't post a play by play on the scanning.

jdod

If you want to wait for the scan to complete you may do so.:)

But I think it has already found the lost/deleted partition. If you are sure that you had only one partition (volume) then that is it. You can cancel the scan with the Cancel button next to the scan progress field.

Now place a tick mark in the square box before the partition indicated . Does the preview map below now show your drive as before?

Then double click on the partition where you had placed the tick mark. Do you see all your files?

Then close the Partition Explorer and click on Finish. In the Main screen click on APPLY.

If the drive does not get a drive letter then give it a drive letter and APPLY.

Your drive should now be accessible.

In some cases it may also be necessary to rewrite the MBR in sector 0. Click on the Disk icon of the specific drive in PW screen and on the left pane click on Rebuild MBR. But be careful to do it on the problem drive and not on any other drive.

Thanks Jumanji. Since it is now Friday and the weekend is upon us, I have waited this long I will likely let the scan finish. Though the scan was moving along quickly end of yesterday, it was 49% complete when I went to bed, this morning it is only 50% complete so it has slowed very much. It has scanned roughly 1477M of the 2930M sectors.

If I do grow impatient and cancel the scan, and find it was too early and have to scan all sectors, do I have to start over or can I pick up where I left off?

OK, let the scan complete. (BTW, did you order a Quick scan or Full Scan? Generally we order only a quick scan. If the quick scan does not find the partitions, or we doubt that it hasn't found all the partitions only then a full scan is performed.)

And no, if you cancel you have start from the beginning. It won't start from where it left. ( There is provision to order a range scan but you must know the start sector and end sector to define the range.)

I know I intended to run a quick scan, and believe that is the default. It is at 52%, 1552M of the 2930M sectors scanned. It is going much slower like in the very beginning.

Thank you Jumanji.

Hi Jumanji,

The scan finally finished this morning. The drive is fully visible, so I think it is restored!

I clicked on "FINISH" on the can screen, there was no "APPLY" on the main screen.

I right clicked the drive on the main screen and selected "Change Label", it correctly showed no current label and I picked the label it had before.

I just opened the drive in regular Windows and was able to brows it fully as far as I can tell.

Jumanji, you are the best, I really appreciate you!

I am awaiting my new backup to finish before I reboot and test, when that happens I will post success. For now the drive works, I want to capture it all in a backup before I do anything. Yes, getting a quality back up system was the FIRST think I did once I restored the drive.