Recover Data From HDD Shows As Unknown Without Damaging It

The computer becomes more and more indispensable in our life; it's an essential medium for saving important personal/study/business files, acquiring information from every corner of the world, keeping in touch with others and exchanging ideas with other people. Accurately speaking, computer is the best choice of many users for data storage, data management and working.

Problem Found: Disk Shows as Unknown

Among the computer compositions, hard disk drive (HDD) is the most significant one. During the continuous use of a computer, a plenty of problems, such as inaccessible partition, mysterious data loss and disk shows as unknown or uninitialized/unallocated/RAW error may appear, beyond all expectations.

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It is really annoying to find disk unknown, not initialized, unallocated. People will be worrying about how to fix a bad hard disk as well as how to recover data from uninitialized disk. Here, I recommend using MiniTool Power Data Recovery for unknown disk recovery and then I will offer some pragmatic tips for fixing disk unknown not initialized error by taking Windows 10 as an example.

Solutions Suggest: Recover Files from HDD Shows as Unknown

Admittedly, all kinds of disk errors may easily appear during the using process of the computer. If you searched this in Google, you'll be even surprised by some hard disk recovery situations.

Currently, I find a large number of users saying that their HDD shows as unknown and the details of their issues are quite different. They're struggling to find a powerful way to recover files from disk shows as unknown completely. Thus, I roughly divide the HDD unknown, not initialized or unallocated error into 4 different types of cases for users' reference.

recommend Please resort to this article when diskpart encounters an error suddenly.

Case 1 – HDD Shows as Unallocated

When your hard disk drive suddenly becomes unallocated, you're not able to see it in Windows Explorer. But if you go to the Windows Disk Management under such circumstances, you'll find it is displayed here.

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The disk type is Basic, but all the space on that disk has been turned into unallocated now. This is similar to an initialized disk which is brand new and includes no formatted partition. Indeed, an unallocated disk indicates that all of your previous partitions are lost.

Of course, you're allowed to create a partition (simple, spanned, striped, mirrored volume) on this disk and make it appear in Windows Explorer, but all of those could damage bring secondary damage to the original data. So, when the entire disk is turned into unallocated all out of a sudden, the first thing people should do is always performing HDD recovery.

How to recover data from unallocated disk:
Step 1: download MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition to your computer and then install it to any of your drives (except the disk which is shown as unknown and has lost data waiting to be recovered). Remember, as long as your HDD is not damaged physically, you've got great chance to recover data from unknown disk.

Step 2: launch this data recovery software to enter its main window as shown below. Next, please click on "Lost Partition Recovery" functional module, which is designed to recover files from deleted/lost partitions.

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Step 3: select the target HDD and press "Full Scan" to detect the lost partitions & files in them. Please note that the full scan may last for a relatively long time, so please wait with patience.

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If your target device is an external HDD and you forget to connect it, you should complete the connection now and press "Refresh" button in the lower left corner. When the external HDD appears in the list, you can finally recover files from external hard drive. As for the "Settings" button, it could help you narrow the scanning range by searching for only appointed file systems and file types.

Step 4: at the end of the full scan, MiniTool Power Data Recovery will find many possible partitions for you and it will list them in the following interface (if too many partitions are found, only some of them will be listed automatically; to see more found partitions, you should click on the "Back" button).

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Now, you have to look through those partitions and select the needed files one after another carefully.

Of course, if you can remember the file name exactly, you may use the "Find" function to navigate to certain files quickly. Or you can enable the "Filter" function to recover certain types of files to accelerate the recovery process.

Step 5: please press "Save" button and choose a proper storage location to store the files that are going to be recovered.

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When all the files are recovered to the appointed place, a prompt window will appear, indicating that the unknown disk recovery is finished and you can close the software currently.

Notice:
If you're using a free edition of MiniTool Power Data Recovery, you'll be able to recover at most 1GB of data. Once the total size of selected files reaches this limit, the "File Saving Limit" prompt window will show up at the moment when you click on "Save" button. At this time, you may either upgrade your free copy of MiniTool Power Data Recovery to an advanced edition or cancel this step & choose fewer files to recover.

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In fact, in addition to Free Edition, MiniTool Power Data Recovery also provides 7 types of license. The main functions of those editions are the same, but the usage limits of different licenses are different. You can find detailed information on our compare license webpage.

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Case 2 – HDD Shows as Not Initialized

When you find your external HDD is not showing up on the current computer, what are you expected to do? Actually, you may open the Disk Management tool built-in Windows and see whether it appears or not.

You may see it appeared here and shown as "Not Initialized". Likewise, all the space of this disk is marked as unallocated. This is exactly the same to the disk which is bought lately and you have no time to initialize it yet. If you right-click on this disk, a pop-up menu will appear and the first option on it is "Initialize Disk".

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However, when people's disk is not initialized anymore due to sudden change, I don't suggest them to initialize the disk to make it usable again. And I believe most of them will care about how to initialize disk without losing data.

On this issue, my suggestion is using MiniTool Power Data Recovery to recover data from uninitialized disk firstly (you should follow the steps mentioned in case 1 to regain your precious data effectively). And then, initialize the disk with Disk Management or other reliable partition managers. Or you can read this post to know more details about disk not initialized problem.

Case 3 – HDD Shows as RAW

Sometimes, you may see your HDD in the Windows Explorer; but when you click to open it, you'll find the access is denied. As a senior user who has used computer for a long time, this situation may be not strange to you. And when you check the HDD in the Disk Management afterward, you find it shows as RAW.

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As you can see, there is no file system on disk 1. This kind of situation will happen when your file system of the HDD is corrupted due to certain reasons. But please remember, you can't agree to format this disk as required unless all data saved there are of no use.

To recover data from a RAW disk, you should choose "Damaged Partition Recovery" in the MiniTool Power Data Recovery main interface. The rest operations are the same to "how to recover data from unallocated disk" mentioned in case 1.

Case 3 – HDD Is Offline

When an HDD is set offline, it won't show up in "Computer", which is often called as "Windows Explorer". This phenomenon seems to be exactly the same with the situation where all your partitions on HDD are lost, but they are really not the same. This is caused basically by pressing "Offline" by mistake. Or when you're under the attack of malicious programs, it may set your HDD to be offline.

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At this time, you have two choices to activate the offline disk.

a). You could try opening DM. And then, right click on the target disk and choose "Online" to fix.
b). You can also open the free edition of MiniTool Partition Wizard. Then, let it set your disk online automatically.

recommend Click here to know how to reactivate a missing or offline dynamic disk.

Case 4 – HDD Is Bad

Sometimes, your hard drive may become a bad disk suddenly. If you run into a power outage while the disk is still running or have been attacked by virus, it's easy that your disk won't show up in Windows Explorer even if you restart computer successfully.

At this time, I also suggest users open Disk Management (DM) to find out whether this disk can be detected or not. If this disk is shown as unallocated or is marked as not initialized, you can open MiniTool Partition Wizard free edition to get hands on more details.

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In above picture, we can see that users' disk, which shows as "Not initialized" in DM, is shown as "Read Only" in MiniTool Partition Wizard. It means that this disk may be write-protected somehow. And it is also shown as a bad disk. This means there must be some problem with the disk.

Now, before you are going to perform any operations to try to fix the disk, please make sure there's no useful data on this disk. If it does include important files, you ought to recover files from the bad disk in advance in order to avoid secondary damage and permanent data loss.

recommend Click to know how to remove write protection.

Till now, you must know well about how to recover data from hard drive that shows as unknown and how to fix the problem in 4 different cases.

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Summary

I'm pretty sure that when users find their HDD shows as unknown or become not accessible, most of them will think of hard disk data recovery and how to fix the problem to make it finally appear.

Of course, I think those users should try every means possible to recover data from unknown disk firstly. The good news is that I can really make it a breeze; please follow the steps I have mentioned above carefully to recover data from disk shows as unknown successfully. And it's not hard to find that having a wonderful hard drive recovery tool is able to grease the wheels.

Suppose that you have spent several days or even months to finish work files and finally save them in a disk, you must be very worried if you wake up one day and find your disk shown as unknown. I know you must feel very terrible by thinking of the fact that you are going to lose those important files and go all over again. As a result, please let MiniTool Power Data Recovery be your last ace, making it all too easy to regain the missing files. After that, you can try all possible means to fix the unknown disk and make it usable again.


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