Initiliaze Disk Windows 11

I had to dump some data onto a SATA drive to keep physical backups for work. And I ran into an issue of Windows 11 not seeing one of the drives.

I knew the drive had to be initialized, but just searching Disk Management didn’t pull up the actual Disk Management service I wanted, it would only pull up in the “Manage Disk and Volumes” section in Windows Settings, where it would see the drive, but the Initialize button was grayed out.

First I tried cleaning the disk with diskpart in Command Prompt as admin

diskpart

list disk

select disk

clean

exit

It claimed to have successfully cleaned the disk but it still wouldn’t let me initialize it from the Windows settings.

In order to get it working I had to run Disk Management from the Command Prompt as an administrator with:

diskmgmt.msc

This actually opened the Disk Management service I was familiar with, and allowed me to initialize the disk.

Two takes from this:

• Why does Disk Management not come up in the Windows Search results?
• Why does the initialize option work in Disk Management but not in the “Manage Disk and Volumes” section of Windows Settings?

I swear Windows 11 is still not stable but maybe I’m just too adjusted to Windows 10 and still finding my way through Windows 11