How to Recover Files from an Unallocated Hard Drive and Make It Work Normally

Your hard drive or partition disappears suddenly, displayed as "Unallocated" in Disk Management? You may feel surprised and not know what to do when you see that empty space, which is the only access to your data. Though all files seem to be gone, there is always a solution. In this guide, we will walk you through recovering your data first, then reconfiguring the unallocated space to get it working again.

Table of contents

Why Did My Partition or Hard Drive Become "Unallocated"?

How to Recover Files from an Unallocated Hard Drive or Partition

How to Restore an Unallocated Hard Drive to A Usable State

Summary

FAQs

Why Did My Partition or Hard Drive Become "Unallocated"?

If you have previously done any operations on this storage device, such as formatting, repartitioning, or cloning, then this situation might be explainable. Otherwise, it could be caused by one of the following reasons:

• ⚠️ File system or partition table damaged by a sudden system freeze, improper removal from the computer, unexpected interruptions during read/write operations, or even virus infections.
• ❌ Your drive is accidentally deleted with disk management tools or erased while reinstalling the operating system.
• 💽 Bad sectors in the essential sectors of the HDD, such as LBA0-LBA63, or logical errors in the SSD controller chip, which result in the operating system failing to read partition information.

As mentioned above, while many factors can cause a drive to be unallocated, the basic cause is that its valid identification information is lost or damaged. In this case, the original files remain intact on the physical sectors, even though the operating system can no longer access them through standard file access. You can retrieve them with the following methods.

How to Recover Files from an Unallocated Hard Drive or Partition

Because any repair operation on unallocated space can put these files at risk of loss, your top priority should be to save them to a safe location. To do that, we'll help you recover data from the unallocated disk.

Method 1. Restore Files with File History

If you enabled File History and the files on that hard drive were included in the backup before the incident, you can easily restore them from the backup with an almost 100% success rate.

1. Press the "Win" + "S" keys and then type "Control Panel" into the search box. Find this option on the results page, then open it and go to "System and Security."
2. Click "Restore your files with File History" under the "File History" section.
3. Use the arrows at the bottom of the window to browse your backed-up content. Once you have found and selected the desired files or folders, right-click the green icon, as shown in this screenshot, and select "Restore to" to save them to an available storage device. If multiple items need to be restored, please hold down the "Ctrl" key and click them one by one.

Method 2. Make Use of Backup and Restore

Its main function is to restore the operating system to an earlier version in case of a failure. However, if you previously chose to display drives with unallocated space, you can also use it to recover lost files. Here are the steps.

1. Select "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" under the "System and Security" option in Control Panel.
2. Click "Restore my files".
3. Click "Browse for folders" to select all data on the hard drive or partition, then click "Add folder".
4. Click "Next".
5. Select "In the following location", then click "Browse" to choose a location where you prefer to save the restored files.
6. Lastly, click "Restore".

Method 3. Use A Free File Recovery Program

You might be wondering whether there is a way to recover files from unallocated space directly. For sure, there is. You can use software programs like iBeesoft Free Data Recovery. It will bypass corrupted or lost partition information to extract these files. Although many similar tools are available, we recommend trying iBeesoft Free Data Recovery first. It is not only user-friendly but also allows you to recover up to 2GB of data for free, which is enough to test the software's restoration capabilities.

1. Download and install iBeesoft Free Data Recovery on your computer.
2. After launching the program, it will automatically detect the "Unallocated" hard drive and mark it as a "Lost Partition." Hover your mouse over this area and click the "Scan" button that appears. At this time, you will see a real-time report showing the number of files found.
3. Once the process is complete, check the checkboxes corresponding to each file you want to recover. Then, click the "Recover" button.
4. iBeesoft Free Data Recovery will prompt you to choose a location to save them. After making your selection, click "Select Folder."

Tip: This step can also help you recover a lost partition on the external hard drive, disk, and more.

Method 4. Send the Unallocated Drive to A Data Recovery Service

In most cases, you can recover data from an unallocated drive yourself with software. However, when there are bad sectors or firmware failures, it is wiser to choose a professional data recovery service. Though it will cost more, it is still worth considering if the drive has critical work data.

How to Restore an Unallocated Hard Drive to A Usable State

After recovering data from an unallocated drive, you can use the following methods to make it workable again.

Method 1. Use Disk Management

Windows includes a utility called "Disk Management" to manage storage devices connected to the computer, which allows you to create new volumes to utilize unallocated space. Here are the steps:

1. Press the "Win" + "R" keys to open the Run dialog box. Then type "diskmgmt. msc" into the text box and click "OK" to open Disk Management.
2. Right-click the unallocated disk or partition and select "New Simple Volume".
3. In the welcome window, click "Next" repeatedly until you get to the "Format Partition" page. Here, you can set its file system and volume label, then click "Next." If it is an external hard drive, we recommend setting the file system to FAT32 or exFAT for better compatibility.
4. After confirming your settings are correct, click "Finish."

Method 2: Use iBeesoft Disk Partition Wizard

Unlike Disk Management, it offers greater flexibility when handling unallocated hard drives. For instance, it allows you to adjust cluster sizes to improve space utilization and performance. Additionally, iBeesoft Disk Partition Wizard enables you to resize partitions, clone disks, convert file systems, and more. Here are the steps for how to use it to recover an unallocated partition or hard drive for free.

1. Download, install, and launch iBeesoft Disk Partition Wizard.
2. Select "Partition Manager" from the sidebar. On the right side of the screen, you should see all your hard drives; click the one labeled "Unallocated" and select "Create".
3. By default, you can simply click "OK" in the pop-up dialog box. If you want to adjust the cluster size, click "Advanced Settings".
4. Last, click "Execute 1 Task(s)" in the right-hand panel.

Summary

As you can see, the above are all workable methods for how to recover an unallocated disk or partition with data on it. As long as the problem is not caused by a physical issue, you can solve it yourself. The whole process contains two main steps. First, recover your data; second, make the unallocated space usable again. Lastly, to prevent your storage device from malfunctioning, we suggest you do the following:

• 🔎 Use tools to closely monitor its status.
• 👀 Think carefully before performing any operations on your disk.
• 🎏 Do not use it as the unique location for storing important files.
• ⏏️ If it is an external hard drive, select the "Eject" option each time you remove it.

FAQs