How to Fix Your Hard Drive Not Showing Up in Disk Management Windows 10/11.If the external hard drive is listed as Offline, you need to first right-click it and set it back to Online. Right-click on the external hard drive marked as 'Unknown' and 'Not Initialized', then choose Initialize Disk. New SSD or hard drive will prompt to initialize. Connect your external hard drive to your PC. Select Disk Management on the left sidebar and open this utility. Right-click This PC/My Computer and choose Manage in the context menu to enter Computer Management.

Method 1: Initialize and Format External Hard Drive with Disk Management How to initialize an external hard drive on Windows? There are two ways to initialize, format, or reformat external hard drives. If you can't access your data for disk corruption, using iBoysoft Data Recovery for Windows to get files off first. If they are used to recover the system, the recovery partition can sometimes be recreated with the recovery CD as well.Tips: Make sure you have backed up files (if any) on the external drive as the following operations will wipe your data off the drive. For computers with Recovery Partitions, these recovery CDs can also sometimes be ordered directly from the OEM. An application used to burn bootable recovery CDs or DVDs is sometimes offered in order to allow a backup of the recovery data. However, if the hard drive fails, is fully reformatted, or is replaced, the recovery partition will be lost. They can also be cheaper for the OEM because they do not need to ship recovery CDs with the computer, adding the price of creating them to the cost of the computer. Partition based recovery systems are usually faster than their disc based counterparts since the data is directly on the hard drive and no disc swapping is needed. Accessing hard drive based system recovery is usually performed by pressing a specific key combination during or after the computer's POST. In recent years, bundled recovery CD-ROMs have become less common, as some OEM's are now utilizing hard drive partitions to store the recovery data. Just do a search for 'recovery' and it should give you the information on how to do it.see here: If you just want to restore your computer back to the state it was when you purchased it you just need to do a recovery from your recovery partition.

How to reformat hard drive for vista