# Drive saying must initialize

**URL:** <https://forums.sandisk.com/t/drive-saying-must-initialize/358993>\
**Category:** External SSD for Windows\
**Created:** [November 9, 2014, 9:33pm UTC](https://forums.sandisk.com/t/drive-saying-must-initialize/358993 "2014-11-09T21:33:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dlk323](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ea666f/32.png) [@dlk323](https://forums.sandisk.com/u/dlk323)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2014, 9:33pm UTC](https://forums.sandisk.com/t/drive-saying-must-initialize/358993/1 "2014-11-09T21:33:40Z")

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My 3TB external drive is suddenly not working. It has been sitting on my desk without moving, and is always shut down properly. In the disk management is has a popup saying:&nbsp; You must initialize a Disk before  
Logical Disk Manager can access it.

Also it is listed without a letter, its size is not showing right and its saying that its 100% free.

Nothing at all has happened to the drive, and the last time I had it plugged in it worked fine. There is 3tb’s of data on it that I need. I am running windows 7. Is there any fix for this? Any help is appreciated.

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**Author:** ![Hamlet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/sandisk/user_avatar/forums.sandisk.com/hamlet/32/44077_2.png) [@Hamlet](https://forums.sandisk.com/u/Hamlet)\
**Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 3:18pm UTC](https://forums.sandisk.com/t/drive-saying-must-initialize/358993/2 "2014-11-10T15:18:51Z")

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Hello,

Seems like a corrupted partition. It may be possible to still extract the data utilizing data recovery software. There are several kinds of Data Recovery software available. If you do a [web search](https://www.google.com/search?q=Data+Recovery) for **Data Recovery** it will yield plenty of data recovery software options.