Can a hard drive be uninitialized

[stereo0138]

i have a laptop that has a hardrive in it that , is not intitalized, but was working and running the operating system fine , now its not initialized. is there a way to un-initialize a drive or a virus that does this? i would like to initialize it but , would like to try a recovery program first, to see if i can get files and folders off first, . Like Recovery My Files from Get Data. Anly body run into this situation??

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

When a HDD is Uninialized, like a new drive, it means that there is no Disk Signature in the Master Boot Record. In a drive that has been working, that segment of the MBR partition has been corrupted in some fashion.

I would download the Easeus Partition Master Home Edition (free edition), connect this HDD to a desktop separate computer, and see if the Partition Master can repair the MBR partition to recover your files.

Here is a link to that web site

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

Hope that's helpful

 

[John_VanKirk]

right click "My Computer"-"Manage"-"Disk Management", right click the disk, you can initialize it.

Hi there,

Just have to remember that if you Initialize a Drive, you will lose all the data that is on it. Sometimes you want to do that to start over with a clean HDD, but if you have data on it that you need, you will need to use first, a data recovery program that can extract the data to a functional HDD, or a partition application that could fix a corrupted partition, and its components like the MBR, Partition table, and Disk signature, and partition signature.