How to Fix External Hard Drive Not Initialized

Many people use removable storage devices to store data or serve as backup drives. After using it for a long while, there are chances that you may find the external hard drive not showing up in Windows File Explorer. In that case, you can open Disk Management to see its status. Usually, you would see the external hard drive show as “Unknown, Not initialized”.

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✅ 【External Hard Drive Not Initialized】
⏰ 0:00 Start
⏰ 0:42​​​​ Situation 1: Not Initialized, Unallocated space
⏰ 4:22​​​ Situation 2: Not Initialized, No Disk Space

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✅ 【Detail】
There are two situations where your disk is shown as not initialized.
Situation 1: Not Initialized, Unallocated space
Situation 2: Not Initialized, No Disk Space
If your disk is in situation 1, you can fix it with two methods.

⏰ 0:52 Situation 1 – Method 1 AOMEI Partition Assistant
With AOMEI Partition Assistant you can rebuild your MBR and fix the disk not initialized issue, and it won’t cause any data loss.
1. Click AOMEI Partition Assistant and get into the interface of it, here you can see your disks and their information clearly.
2. Here disk 3 shows not initialized, unallocated space, right-click your disk, and click “Rebuild MBR”.
3. In this pop-up window, choose your system, and click OK.
4. Click “Proceed” and click “Apply”.
After that, your hard drive can be shown normally.

⏰ 2:03 Situation 1 – Method 2 Disk Management/DiskPart
If method 1 is not working for your situation, you can directly use these two tools to initialize it, but it will cause data loss.

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✅ 【Tips】
If your disk is in situation 2, you need to check your disk first to see if there is a physical error.
If there is nothing bad on the disk, you can turn off the PC, disconnect the hard drive for a while and turn on the computer. Then, shut down the computer, reconnect the hard drive to your PC and restart the PC to see if the disk can be shown normally.
If it is not working, you can try the two methods below:

⏰ 4:56 Situation 2 – Method 1 Check Disk Update
Go check whether your driver is outdated. If so, you need to upgrade the outdated driver.
Here are the detailed steps:
1. Right-click the start button, select device manager from the list
2. Click “Disk drivers”
3. Right-click your external hard drive, and select Update Driver.
4. Select Search automatically for updated driver software.
After that, it would be worked.

⏰ 5:30 Situation 2 – Method 2 Check Bad Sectors
If your hard drive’s problem still can be fixed after these operations, you need to check if there are bad sectors or if it is physically broken, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant to do this.
1. Get into AOMEI Partition Assistant first.
2. Right-click your disk and choose “Surface Test”.
3. In the pop-up window click “Quick Check” and click “Start” to execute it, then the bad sectors and other information will show up.

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