How to Initialize Disk Using A Free Tool

Background

When you add a new hard disk to your computer, it won't appear in "This PC" or File Explorer. Instead, it often shows up as uninitialized in Disk Management. On Windows 10/11 computers, you can open Disk Management by right-clicking the Start icon and selecting Disk Management. A message box and wizard will typically prompt you to initialize the new disk. If you don't see the initialization prompt, you can right-click the new disk in Disk Management and select the "Initialize Disk" option from the context menu.

Additionally, an old hard disk that has been in use for a long time might become uninitialized due to reasons like partition table corruption, virus infection, or disk cleanup operations.

Regardless of the cause, you cannot write any data to an uninitialized disk. So, how can you initialize a disk on a Windows computer? You can initialize the disk under Disk Management or use IM-Magic Partition Resizer to initialize the disk.

Steps to Initialize Disk Using Partition Resizer

Preparations: Insert your new disk to PC if it's an internal disk. Or connect your disk to PC via it's usb cable if it's an external disk.

Step1. Download the free tool Partition Resizer, install it on your PC. Right click the uninitialized disk and select "Init Disk" option.

Step2. Choose MBR or GPT for your disk. Or you may leave it by default.

Note: Disk over 2TB needs GPT.

Step3. Click "Apply Changes" button.

Situations to Init Disk

You probably want to init disk in following situations:

1. Init disk to erase all data
2. Init a new added disk for data storage
3. Init disk which shows uninitialized after clean up disk
4. Init disk that shows uninitialized due to partition table corruption, bad sectors, virus attack, etc