How to Troubleshoot Hard Drive Status Using Disk Management
Disk Management is a system utility in Windows that enables you to perform advanced storage management tasks such as adding or changing drive letters, shrinking volumes, and extending volumes.
When you are having a problem with a hard drive, it helps to know what the status information in the Disk Management windows means.
There are a bunch of reasons a hard drive might be missing, fail to initialize, offline or have a status as a foreign disk, with a common reason being because the disk is failing. There's only so much you can do to fix a failing disk.
Here are the drive and volume statuses you might see in the Disk Management window:
If you are still having problems with a hard drive, check the Event Viewer for event logs for the drive that is having problems.
These event logs might help you understand the nature of the problem and what to do about it.
When you are having a problem with a hard drive, it helps to know what the status information in the Disk Management windows means.
There are a bunch of reasons a hard drive might be missing, fail to initialize, offline or have a status as a foreign disk, with a common reason being because the disk is failing. There's only so much you can do to fix a failing disk.
Here are the drive and volume statuses you might see in the Disk Management window:
- Healthy The healthy volume status indicates that the volume is formatted with a file system and that the file system is working without errors.
- Healthy (At Risk) Used to indicate that a dynamic volume is currently accessible but I/O errors have been detected on the underlying dynamic disk. This option is usually associated with Online (Errors) for the underlying disk.
- Failed A failed volume status indicates a problem with the hard drive or the file system has become corrupted.
- Online Indicates that the disk is accessible and that it is functioning properly. This is the normal disk status.
- Online (Errors) Indicates that I/O errors have been detected on the dynamic disk. One possible fix for this error is to right-click the disk and select Reactivate Disk to attempt to return the disk to Online status. This fix will work only if the I/O errors were temporary. You should immediately back up your data if you see this error and suspect that the I/O errors are not temporary.
- Offline or Missing Indicates that the dynamic disk is not accessible. This can occur if the disk is corrupted or the hardware has failed. If the error is not caused by hardware failure or major corruption, you may be able to re-access the disk by using the Reactivate Disk option to return the disk to Online status. If the disk was originally offline and then the status changed to Missing, it indicates that the disk has become corrupted, has been powered down, or was disconnected.
- Unreadable Indicates that the disk is inaccessible and might have encountered hardware errors, corruption, or I/O errors or that the system disk configuration database is corrupted. This message may also appear when a disk is spinning up while the Disk Management utility is rescanning the disks on the computer.
- Unknown Indicates that the boot sector for the volume become corrupted. This error can also occur if no disk signature is created for the volume.
- Incomplete Occurs when you move some, but not all, of the disks from a multi disk volume. If you do not complete the multi volume set, then the data will be inaccessible.
- Foreign This error can occur if you move a dynamic disk to a computer which was configured as a dynamic disk from another computer. You can correct this error by right-clicking the disk and selecting th Import Foreign Disks option. Any existing volume information will then be visible and accessible.
- Active One partition on a Master Boot Record (MBR) disk will be marked as Active. This is the partition BIOS looks for an operating system boot manager to load into system memory.
- EFI System Partition UEFI firmware looks to this volume to find an operating system boot manager to boot an operating system.
- System Reserved The System Reserved Partition holds the Boot Configuration Database, Boot Manager Code, Windows Recovery Environment and reserves space for the startup files which may be required by BitLocker, in case you use the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature. BIOS looks to this volume to find an operating system boot manager to boot an operating system.
- Unallocated Space on the disk is marked as unallocated if it has not yet been formatted.
- Unknown Not Initialized Disk unknown not initialized issue can be caused by various reasons like virus infection, file system damage, bad sectors, MBR corruption, partition loss, etc. It is the easiest way to fix disk unknown not initialized issue by clicking Initialize Disk option.
These event logs might help you understand the nature of the problem and what to do about it.