Vista format disk is not initialized

Windows Vista, 7 and 8 have a built-in Disk management tool. Choose format from the menu and a new Window will appear with a few formatting options. Within a minute your hard drive will be formatted. Disk management tool can be open in two different ways one is to type diskmgmt. When the tool loads, it will analyze all your computers drives and will prompt you to initialize a new disk that it finds.

You can also clean the disk by using the command prompt if you do not intend to retain the data on your hard drive.

Here are the steps:. If none of the above solutions works for you, then you should perform the data recovery operation on your external hard drive and retrieve all the important files.

You are required to follow our three-step process to recover deleted files after installing the app. To initialize the recovery process through Recoverit, you are needed to run it by following the steps below:.

There can be multiple smaller factors behind the drive, not getting initialized by the PC. It is entirely up to you to provide a healthy environment to your machine and enable its full capabilities.

In this article, we have discussed the causes behind such an error and the possible solutions to fix the problem with the external hard disk. One of them is the method to recover files by using the Recoverit Data Recovery program if you feel the need to access your data. Generally rated 4. Solutions to the Disk Unknown, Not Initialized or Unallocated Issues Have you ever faced the issue that your external hard drive is not initialized on your Windows PC when you plug it in? I am having the same problem.

I have a disk drive that works externally on a Windows XP Pro machine but when I connect to Windows 7 it says I need to initialize the disk.

I can't re-initialize because I will loose my data. I do have a backup but not sure how recent it is. Any ideas? Sunday, March 14, PM. I just figured out what was wrong The problem was my drive was USB 2. So I guess Windows 7 requires you to plug into the drive that it was designed for?????

I shut down the drive. Turned it back on. Then plugged it into a drive that was 2. It helps you recover the lost partition as well as its data. This will be useful as long as the new partition has not been created. Buy Now. Here is a step-by-step guide below in Windows Step 2: Select the scanning range for the specified disk. There are three scanning range as follows:. Step 4: Wait for this scan to complete finding the lost or deleted partitions. After finishing a scan, all lost partitions will be displayed in the following list.

Please select the partitions you need. Here you can double-click the searched partition to explore its content. Step 5: In the main interface, you can preview all lost partitions. If you find it useful, share it with other people to help them too. Buy Now Click to tweet. After performing partition recovery, the issue of disk 1 unknown not initialized external hard drive should be fixed, and all data on this disk should be able to be accessed.

The data on your external hard drive can be recovered by MiniTool. It offers a " Data Recovery " feature that quickly recovers data when a hard drive is not initialized with simple clicks.

Step 1: Choose the unknown not initialized disk and click the " Data Recovery " feature from " Check Disk ". Step 2: This software will start scanning the selected disk; wait patiently until the scan completes.