Upgraded main HDD and now a secondary HDD is showing Unallocated

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

As the title says... I tend to upgrade my Main C Drive which currently is a 256GB Samsung SSD 840 Series once every 6-12 months or so for performance as the price of SSD's come down. I have 3 other HDD's in my computer that always stay the same and are all WD 1TB (D, E, and F). However, with this last upgrade, one of my HDD's decided to become a PITA and is now unrecognized according to Computer Management.

According to Computer Management, Disk 1 is "Unknown", Not Initialized, and Unallocated.

It looks as if I need to initialize the disk but I'm scared to. Do I have to initialize and if so, which option do I choose?

I have many years of personal files and pictures on this particular drive.

Please help me with the steps I need to take to recover my data on this HDD.

Many Thanks in advance !!!

Hello kemble. Welcome to the forum

Do not initialize the disk if you want to recover your data. Doing so will overwrite the file system and make this much more difficult.

I assume the old 1TB HDD had the OS on it?
Do you know if it was initialized as MBR or GPT?
The new SSD: was that initialized as MBR or SSD?
When you installed W7 on the SSD, did you disconnect both 1TB drives while doing so?

Please post a pic of Disk Management without the initialize window blocking the view. Expand it so we can read everything.

Turn off your computer and swap the cables between your two 1TB drives. You say you were upgrading a drive in the computer and thus I suspect a possibility of physical damage and could be causing data transfer errors. Have you tried HD Tune ( HD Tune website free trial) to check the drive for SMART errors and can you post the results?

I like herqulees suggestions. Can't hurt, might help.

All indications (and some excellent tests BTW) are that the drive has gone bad. This could be because it has actually gone bad, or because of a connectivity problem. So double check all the connections, try to plug it into different SATA ports, try different power connectors, everything.

The drive is recognized by the system, otherwise it would not show up in Disk Management. I bet if you went into the BIOS you would see it there too.
The problem may be with the basic file system. As in there is none. The data is all probably still on the disk, but no way to put the puzzle together.

One thing I suggest is to use Partition Wizard and the "Rebuild MBR" option on the drive. But the "Bad Drive" description does not give me much hope that will be possible.

Another program a lot of people here have used to recover data from bad drives is RECUVA. You might give that a try too.

TVeblen said:

I like herqulees suggestions. Can't hurt, might help.

All indications (and some excellent tests BTW) are that the drive has gone bad. This could be because it has actually gone bad, or because of a connectivity problem. So double check all the connections, try to plug it into different SATA ports, try different power connectors, everything.

The drive is recognized by the system, otherwise it would not show up in Disk Management. I bet if you went into the BIOS you would see it there too.
The problem may be with the basic file system. As in there is none. The data is all probably still on the disk, but no way to put the puzzle together.

One thing I suggest is to use Partition Wizard and the "Rebuild MBR" option on the drive. But the "Bad Drive" description does not give me much hope that will be possible.

Another program a lot of people here have used to recover data from bad drives is RECUVA. You might give that a try too.

I was going to suggest Recuva too as I use it myself but am not sure it supports scanning whole drives? As in I think it can only scan drives that have an assigned letter. I have nothing to test that theory on though.
I know some good ways to dig the data back off the hard drive, assuming the drive is still capable of basic operation, but all require Linux/Ubuntu (using the dd command) and a lot of storage space (1TB in this case) to copy the disk sector by sector to another storage medium before the drive suffers any more damage, that way you have a clone to recover your files from and/or you can figure out what went wrong on the clone and apply the fix to the hard drive, taking out any further risk of data loss. If you are interested I can instruct you through the process, but it will be lengthy and as I said you will need a free 1TB of space to do the job.

Hi Kemble,

You said that you have three "other" drives. But all your screenshots show only two "other" drives.:)

Never mind. I take there are only two other identical drives.

Before you go on to try any data recovery:

There is a remote possibility of the two identical drives suffering from what is known as "signature collision" which can only happen when those are connected simultaneously.

To exclude this possibility, try connecting only one drive at a time and check.

EDIT: First swap the SATA cables to both the identical drives as pointed by herqulees and check ( A damaged/not-properly seated SATA cable can create this problem) before trying this one-at-a-time check.