Is it safe to initialise a corrupt USB drive in Disk Management?

**alhafar** · 10-12-2013

Hi, I have been scouring for solutions, hope someone can help!

Problem: I was running norton windoctor on my laptop, which I often do, except this time I happened to have my 500 MB Seagate expansion usb drive plugged in. I noticed windoctor was taking longer to run as usual, and saw it scanning my USB drive. WHen I unplugged the drive (after about 5 minutes of running windoctor), lo behold, it was now unrecognisable in any computer. It's a pretty new drive, hardly used, but full of back up files. I am sure in 5 minutes 500 MB of data couldnt be all deleted, either right? It should be there.

Now, when I plug in the USB drive to my computer, on the taskbar the USB device is shown plugged in, driver is up to date, and says the device is functioning properly. However, it doesnt show on My Computer. Some internet solutions tell me to assign it a drive letter so it can be seen. However, Disk Management does not give me that option, I only get the Initialise option for this disk. It appears as a single unpartitioned disk.

I guess my partition table has been corrupted by the norton windoctor (it happened before on one of my internal hard drives, same thing, but I managed to use a rescue programme to retrieve my files in that case)

Now, problem is I am afraid to inititalise it, but it seems to be the only way to get the computer to recognise the drive. Otherwise, every file recovery software I try just isnt able to scan the drive for files and partitions. Altho in some better software the drive is visible in the list of drives, even deep scanning it turns out completely zero results for files or partitions. That's impossible, right?

Question:

1. If I initialise the USB drive as Disk management tells me to, would that overwrite the data on the drive? I really hope to retrieve the files from the drive

2. Is there any way to assign the drive a letter without initialising it?

3. Why is the Disk Manager (and most other software) reading my 500 MB drive as a 2TB drive?

Am really at wits end! Appreciate if someone can help.

Thanks
Al

**Expertz** · 11-12-2013

You shouldnt have disconnected the drive when Windoctor was scanning the drive and because of that the MBR of the drive might be corrupted. Try a sfc /scannow on the usb drive or all the drive and then restart your computer and check if it is able to repair the system files. Other than that if all recovery softwares fail to retrieve the data then you are out of luck and will have to initialise the USB drive to get it working again but all data will be lost I think.

**alhafar** · 11-12-2013

Thanks Expertz, but may I ask what is sfc /scannow? I tried to use checkdisk but since I cannot assign a disk letter to the drive, i cannot run it. BTW i stopped the windoctor before unplugging the drive. I think windoctors scan somehow corrupted the MBR, altho it shdnt have, it was just checking for errors and hadnt reached the 'fix' stage yet. I noticed something was wrong when the windoctor took longer than usual and I saw that it was scanning the drive when it should only be scanning the C drive windows directories. Anyone know what initialise actually does, does it just write on the MBR sectors?

al

**EINSTEIN_007** · 12-12-2013

sfc /scannow will scan all protected system files immediately. You can read about it in details over here - http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d....mspx?mfr=true. And yes, if you will initialise the disk then it will overwrite the MBR and you will lose all your data.