Do I Need To Initialise My New Drive ??

I make music on my computer, using windows 8.1
I use a huge amount of data as Im dealing with a lot of wav files, vst files, dll files etc.....
I have about 3 external hard drives, but they were all full.

I bought another one yesterday.....a 4TB WD My Passport.

My plan was to move a lot of data onto this new drive. I wanted to move stuff that isn't being accessed on a daily basis, to free up a lot of space on some of the other drives.
All good so far.............

I'd already moved 500GB of data from a partition on another drive, to the new 4TB drive, and I wanted to erase the old partition.
When I opened disc management, it was prompting me to "initialise" the new 4TB drive and describes it as "unallocated". I wasn't prompted to format the drive when I first connected it to the USB, and I can access the data on the drive ok ( I played some wav files ), and it looks normal from the My Computer screen where I can see all my drives and how much data is stored on them.

Should I move all the data back to the original drives again, and format the new drive, or is there no problem with this EXCEPT in the disc management screen ??

 

First off, if it works you are probably OK.
Look on your packaging and see if 8.1 is listed as supported OS. There may be a driver that needs to be installed, the drive can work without their specific driver, but may be slower.

Under the "better safe than sorry" motto, backup and clear all errors before continuing. If you have backups elsewhere "probably OK" may be good enough.

 

Me either. In fact, I don't can't remember the last time I ever had to initialize a "new" hard drive. They have all come from the factory ready to go - and I am talking about the last 3 or so decades!

 

hmmm....

When I opened disc management that time, everything was ok.

I have two usb slots on the front of my desktop pc.
I have the 4TB plugged into 1, and an older 320GB ( also WD ) plugged into the other, but I think the slot with the 320 might be a bit faulty and doesn't always read correctly.
Disc management is fine now and everything is showing as "healthy"

I have a new issue though.
Because everything was showing as healthy, I assumed the data had been moved to the new drive and it was safe to delete the old partition ( which is on yet another, bigger, external drive ).
I right clicked and deleted the partition from within disc management.
It shows as bright green and says I have 150GB of free space, which is great.....but......when i try to view it in My Computer, its not there.
I doesnt seem to have been added onto either of the other 2 partitions on that drive, and doesn't have a drive letter anymore either.

 

You're getting help on two different support forums:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/666560/do-i-need-to-initialise-my-new-drive/

 

whats wrong with that ?
Im maximizing my chances of getting a reply becaus ethe holidays are slow and I need to get this fixed as soon as I can.

was there anything in the majorgeeks signup form that said I can only deal with one computer help forum exclusively ?
Does this make me "unfaithful" ? Its not like im married to majorgeeks.........good grief.

 

so why does someone feel the need to point that out ? the inference is that im doing something wrong.
If majorgeeks didnt hand-check every new registration, I wouldnt have felt the need to ask the question somewhere else, but as it said " your registration has to go through quarantine. someone will be in touch sometime....who knows when....how long is a piece of string? " I felt the need to ask the question somewhere else.

 

once again......a troll has derailed the train of thought on a post on a forum, and the question hasn't been answered.

It doesnt matter. I cant deal with this bs today.

 

like I said, up there, in my 2nd post............that issue resolved itself, and was replaced by.......oh it doesnt matter. Forget I asked.