You might have come across a lot of disk problems that may cause damage to your disk partition layout plus the crucial disk data. The most common one, a hard disk becomes unknown (unallocated, not initialised, RAW or Offline) suddenly. Does your HDD suddenly become unallocated or shows up as unallocated hard drive in Windows? Don’t panic, just relax! Here you’ll find practical solutions to fix such errors on your hard drive/external hard drive.
Before learning how to fix a problem, it’s important to know from where and how it has arisen? So, let’s try to understand What is Unallocated Hard drive? How a hard disk become unallocated in Windows? Then we’ll check for ways to allocate the unallocated hard drive.
Unallocated Hard Drive/Disk: What does it mean?
1. HDD Shows Unallocated:
Sometimes, your get to see an unallocated hard disk all of a sudden. As a result, you’re not able to see it in the Windows Explorer. Now, when you visit Windows Disk Management, you’ll find that its displayed there.
Its a basic disk type, but all the disk space turns into unallocated. You got to worry since this unallocated hard disk indicates that your previous partitions might be lost. What best you can do in such a situation? Not to panic, just when your hard disk shows unallocated, you should be performing an HDD recovery.
2. HDD Shows Not Initialized
When you see your external HDD isn’t showing up on your computer, what you should do? You need to open up the built-in Windows Disk Management tool and check if it appears or not.
Check if it appears here and shows as “Not Initialized”. Similarly, all the disk space shall be marked as unallocated. This may exactly happen to the disk that you bought lately but you didn’t get time to initialize it. When you right-click on this disk, you can see a pop-up menu. The first option that appears is the “Initialize Disk”.
But, if your disk is not initialized owing to a sudden change, You must try to get back data from the uninitialized disk firstly. Then, you can move ahead and initialize your disk with available Windows built-in tool or third-party tools.
There are primarily 2 choices while initializing a hard disk.
3. HDD Shows as RAW
At times, you might visualise your HDD in Windows Explorer. But, if you click to open it, you’ll see that the access is denied.
If you are an experienced user, this may be not sound strange to you in anyway. You’ll find that the hard disk is showing as RAW if you check it in Disk Management.
Just see, there is no file system on disk 1. This shall happen if your HDD file system is corrupted. Make sure you don’t agree to format this disk as required until the data saved is of no use.
4. HDD Is Offline
As and when HDD is set as offline, it wouldn’t display in “Computer”, that is in “Windows Explorer”. This phenomenon is similar with the situation to a situation where partitions on HDD are lost. But, actually they are not the same.
The reason is you might have pressed “Offline” by mistake. Or when certain malicious programs trigger to attack, it might turn your HDD to offline.
5. HDD Is Bad
Have you experienced that your hard drive suddenly becomes a bad disk? Do you know its causes? This may be due to a power outage where the disk is still running. Another possible reason is that you have been attacked by virus. It is very easy for your disk to not show up in Windows Explorer even when you restart your computer system.
Now, that you know What is unallocated hard drive or what makes a hard drive unallocated? You can take requisite steps to repair it and fix this issue. You must learn to recover unallocated hard disk and retrieve your important data back easily.
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