The hard drive became unallocated – how to fix
The drive becomes unallocated or uninitialized if it has neither a partition nor a volume; as a consequence,
Windows Explorer doesn't display such a disk. Unallocated or "not initialized" issue may happen with any storage device, be it a hard drive,
USB flash drive or memory card, as a result of accidental incorrect user actions, as well as due to the circumstances independent of the user.
Usually, you do not see an unallocated drive in Windows Explorer. To see the drive you need to go to the Disk Management
(press WinKey + R on the keyboard, type diskmgmt.msc and then press Enter).
Disk Management displays the drive as having black unllalocated area.
The main reasons why a hard drive becomes unallocated
- Accidental deletion of a partition in Disk Management.
- Deletion of a partition when reinstalling Windows.
- Increasing or decreasing the size of the system partition.
- Crash or shutdown of the PC while working with the partitions.
- File system conversion process.
How to recover data form unallocated hard drive
What to do if the drive became unallocated? How to recover lost files?
First of all, if important data is stored on the drive, do not rush to create a new partition on this drive.
This may decrease the chance of successful data recovery.
To recover data from an unallocated disk, you need to use a special data recovery software - ReclaiMe File Recovery.
- Make sure you have enough free space on a known-good drive to hold all the recovered data.
- Download and install ReclaiMe File Recovery.
- Identify the drive you want to recover data from in the device list, select it and click Start.
- The files are displayed as soon as they are discovered.
- Check the recovery quality using the Preview function.
- Purchase a license key, activate the software, and start copying.
How to fix unallocated drive
Once you copied the data from the unallocated drive to another storage device, you can allocate the drive, that is, create a New volume (Local disk).
To do this, go to Disk Management, right-click on the unallocated area and select "Create a simple volume".
Next, follow the prompts of the “New Volume Wizard”.
Still have questions?