You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it

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I have a 3TB Western Digital internal drive running for more than three years in a StarTech SATA Dock.  Yesterday I noticed after boot that that drive was not appearing in Explorer.  I looked in Disk Management and when I clicked on that drive, I got the message “You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it.”  I can select either MBR or GPT.  It’s a GPT drive, but I’m not sure why it lost this information unless the Western Digital is failing.

Why did it throw this error message?

If I select the GPT option, will I lose all of my data?

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Try the solutions given here:

https://www.datanumen.com/blogs/6-solutions-to-you-must-initialize-a-disk-before-logical-disk-manager-can-access-it-in-windows/

 

Jerry

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Cybertooth

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It’s possible that the SATA dock itself (that is, the connectors) has developed a problem.

I have a Sabrent SATA-to-USB adapter that I use to connect hard-disk drives that I want to examine but without the bother of opening the PC case to install them. It used to work fine, but lately every HDD that I connect to it is listed as “RAW” in Disk Management. However, if I connect the same HDDs using a different adapter, they show up as formatted fine with all their data intact.

You might want to try connecting the same Western Digital disk to the PC some other way–either with a different dock or with an adapter like I have, or else directly inside the PC–and then see what the computer tells you about the disk.

 

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I guess that’s part of my question: what causes this error and does it automatically mean a bad drive?  My drive was SMART, so wouldn’t it have alerted me if it detected a growing failure problem?  How does SMART work here?

 

I have one of those Apricorn universal adaptors for internal drives.  Not sure if that will work on newer drives or not….

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Cybertooth has suggested that your difficulty may not be your drive. And this is why your SMART tests indicate no failure. He went on to suggest some practical experimental steps you could take to verify if this is truly the difficulty you are experiencing.

Have you attempted any of these steps to demonstrate the actual point of failure?

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Cybertooth

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[mn--]

Could also be a cable fault. Had that happen once, was quite nasty as it had scrambled data on the drive too – partition table at least was toast.

Recovered by replacing only the SATA cable and restoring from backup (Windows 7, non-boot drive.) Didn’t check if any data would’ve been recoverable without backups, because that’d have been more work and longer outage than what we did…

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by mn--.

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Cybertooth

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Site not accepting my log-in so I’ll be Anonymouse #2.  Disk Management should allow initializing a drive when needed.  As for External adapters, there’s 2 printed circuit boards involved, one is the interface on the drive itself and the other is the actual adapter inside the case, either one could be at fault but the ones I’ve seen fail have been in the case.  Another device I use doesn’t have a case but can connect to a drive for testing.

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I took my drive and SATA dock to my PC expert.  The dock is fine and she is recovering the data to a new drive.  I haven’t had a final discussion with her yet, but I’m guessing she initialized the original drive and then used software to recreate the address tables (whatever initializing deletes) so that she could salvage the data for restoration to the new drive.  I’ll give more details when we talk.

Thanks for all the great help.

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Cybertooth

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WSC3

It would be great if you got back to us with more info on how your tech proceeded…

Just had that message on my internal HDD and a reseat of cables seems to have done the trick,,

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I have 4 different ways to attach sata hdds to both pc and mac.  one is 2.5″ only but the other 3 can do 3.5 and 2.5 disks.  I do this because for some reason (that I’m not willing to spend the time figuring out) they don’t all behave the same when a disk is failing.  windows is not a good os to plug a failing ntfs or windows boot disk into.  if it sees a windows or ntfs volume it tries to figure out permissions and do other background tasks.  so my first attempts at mounting are always mac os with tuxera ntfs and volitans smart utility.  for windows drive diagnostics a decent first pass is crytal disk info, free and fast.  doesn’t need to be installed just run it from a usb stick once you’ve downloaded and unzipped it.  if the hardware is failing but the platter is ok you’ll see end to end failures and maybe crc errors but no bad/reallocated/removed sectors.

 

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Hey,

I bought a new HDD, she used recovery s/w to move all of my data from the old drive to the new, both in the SATA dock.  It took a couple of days to move all of the info as it was video data and there was lots of it, plus system info like File History.

Answering the error message did delete the address table, but she was able to get to the info with her data recovery s/w.  Hope this helps.

WSC

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wavy

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