Windows11 Storage Space has disappeared.

Hi George,

Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your detailed information and research on your problem. If you have two different disks loaded on your PC, it looks like this Seagate HDD is damaged. Based on your description, the unlabeled partitions (12) should be your disappeared HDD storage space, (judging from the space capacity) If this HDD is still under warranty, I recommend you contact after-sales support. Sometimes unexpected power outages or severe shaking may cause hard drives to fail.

Maybe you can try chkdsk command to detect the disk, but if the disk is damaged, this command may not work or return any useful information.

1. Click Win key + X to open "Command Prompt (Admin)"
2. Type chkdsk <drive letter>: /f in the command prompt window

For example, check and repair the E partition:

chkdsk E: /f

Press Enter to start the chkdsk disk check tool to scan the E partition. Check other partitions similarly. Please check other drive letters other than your system drive first. The detection of system drive requires restarting.

If you have important files on this disc, it's strongly recommended to contact a data recovery service or a professional computer repair shop to help protect your data before proceeding. Hope you can get your problem fixed soon!

Best Regards,

William.Y | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

I was able make some partial repairs after initializing Disk 12.  Here’s the situation at the moment.  Both spaces are now visible from Settings, and from Control Panel. But only G:\ can be accessed from Windows Explorer. 

I need to be able to access as much of the data that used to be in E: as possible.  Here’s what I know. 

At the end of October, I used settings to rename the first storage space “Backup rebuilt 202410130” (the file system continued to call it E:\ ). 

I created the second storage space (G:\ ) at the same time with the intent of moving the data from e: to g:.  Both spaces have a “Status" of "OK”. 

The first one, (the old E:) says:

Two-way mirror

Using 12 TB of pool capacity

Status: Online, Unhealthy, No redundancy, Degraded. 

Settings shows 10  Physical Disks, and 4 of them say “Status: Warning, Missing”.  If I click on the “Properties” button for any of these four, Settings disappears from the screen.  (i.e. it appears to have crashed). 

If I try to use the old Control Panel to try to manage the “Backup rebuilt 202410130” storage space: the data matches that which was displayed in Settings.  But I can't do very much; Nine of the 10 drives have only a Rename command. One of the drives has 2 commands: “Rename” and “Remove”. If I try to use the remove command, it fails.  (“Can’t remove the drive from the pool” –  “Drive could not be removed because not all data could be reallocated.  Add an additional drive to this pool and reattempt this operation”.  I’ve tried adding a drive, and gotten the same result. 

Disk Management shows:

Disk 0 with Four partitions (including c:\ )

Disk 11 contains G:\

Disk 12 contains 14359.98 GB of Unallocated storage

The Windows PowerShell's Get-StoragePool command shows three StoragePools - all of which are "Healthy". None of them are listed as "Degraded" or "UnHealthy", But the second one is labeled "Backup rebuilt 20241030" - which is the name of the missing E:\ storage space - Progress!!!!

I’m thinking that Disk 12 could be the storage that should be in the storage space (E:).  How can I determine if that’s true?  Should I try Repairing it? More importantly, Can I recover the files that are in there?

Before the e: storage space disappeared, I was able to use Settings to display its physical drives. I printed the displays from Settings, and from Control Panel - which I had been using to manage E: . Settings labeled one of them: "12 Seagate One Touch HDD SCSI Disk Device".

Is that the same disk that disk management is asking me to initialize?

Many thanks William - it's really good to know that there are people available when I run into problems.   I got as far as starting Disk Management before finding something that didn't look right It shows five volumes that are healthy - they are:

1. The new storage space (the one that is working) – G:.
2. Windows C:,
3. Three partitions labeled
   • “Disk 0 partition 1”,
   • “Disk 0 partition 3”,
   • “Disk 0 partition 1”,

The old storage space that I’m trying to recover is not there (the last time I was able to access it, it was called e:). 

Disk Management displayed an “Initialize Disk” box that says “Disk 12” must be initialized before Logical Disk Manager can access it.  I can't do anything until I respond to this box. It wants me to choose a partition style: either MBR or GPT (GUID Partition Table). 

Should I initialize disk 12? Is there any way for me to see which drive is "disk 12", or what’s on Disk 12 before I initialize it?

Hello George,

Welcome to the Microsoft Community.

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you're having with your storage spaces. Let's try a few steps to recover your data and resolve the issue:

1. Check Disk Management:
   • Open Disk Management by right-clicking the Start button and selecting "Disk Management".
   • Look for your storage spaces here. If they appear, note their status and any error messages.
2. Use PowerShell:
   • Open PowerShell as an administrator (right-click the Start button and select "Windows PowerShell (Admin)").
   • Run the following command to list all storage pools and their status:

       Get-StoragePool
     

   • Check the status of your storage pools. If the first one is listed as "Degraded" or "Unhealthy", you can try to repair it with:

       Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName "YourStorageSpaceName"
     

3. Check Event Viewer:
   • Open Event Viewer by typing "Event Viewer" in the Start menu search and selecting it.
   • Navigate to Windows Logs > System and look for any errors or warnings related to your storage spaces.
4. Data Recovery Software:
   • If the above steps don't work for your case, you might need to reach for some third-party data recovery service or software. These can help recover data from degraded or inaccessible drives.

Best Regards,

William.Y | Microsoft Community Support Specialist