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Normally, if you insert a new drive to Mac, you have to initialize it first. Otherwise, it’s not able to mount and use the drive on the machine. However, if there are some issues happen on a USB flash drive or external drive, you may also be required to initialize the drive once you insert the drive to your Mac.

recover lost data after initializing USB flash drive or external hard drive on Mac

Have you ever seen above message when you connect your portable drive, like USB flash drive and external drive? If you see the message and ensure the drive is ever used with data on the drive, then there should be issues with the drive. Normally, if you encounter such an issue, you can solve it by initializing the drive directly in most cases. After you initialize the disk, you can reuse the disk. However, after initializing the drive, it’s empty and your data on the disk will not be accessed. On this page, we will show you the solutions to recover lost data after initializing USB flash drive or external drive on Mac.

Even the drive is still empty after initializing it, the old data is still on the disk. With data recovery software, you can easily extract the data from the initialized USB flash drive or external drive.

Download the data recover software

Before you start the data recovery from a USB flash drive or external drive after you initialize it, please first find the most effective data recovery software. We suggest you have a try with Do Your Data Recovery for Mac. Please download and install the software on your Mac machine.

The software is able to recover data from corrupted drive, inaccessible drive, lost partition, formatted drive. Also, you can use this software to recover deleted or lost data in any other cases. If you initialize a corrupted drive, the software can also help you recover the lost data from the drive.

With this simple software, you are able to recover lost data easily in such a case. With only 3 steps, you can recover data with this wizard-style software. The interface is intuitive and understandable. Any home or business users can operate this software to accomplish the data recovery task.

How to recover the data step by step?

To recover the data in such a case, please first initialize the USB flash drive or external drive. You can just click the “Initialize...” button in the pop up to initialize the drive directly. Then the Mac machine and the software can mount and load the disk successfully. After that, you can run the data recovery software to recover data step by step.

Step 1. Run the software and choose the initialized drive.

Launch the data recovery software and you will see the connected drives, including the initialized drive. Please ensure to select it to continue.

recover lost data after initializing USB flash drive or external hard drive on Mac

Step 2. Click the “Scan” button to scan the drive.

Click the “Scan” button and it will start to scan your initialized USB flash drive or external drive. The software will scan and try to search for all the lost data on the disk.

recover lost data after initializing USB flash drive or external hard drive on Mac

Step 3. Preview and recover the lost data.

After the scan process is completed, the software will list all the found lost files. Please check and preview the files first. Then choose the wanted files to recover to another drive.

recover lost data after initializing USB flash drive or external hard drive on Mac

To avoid the corruption for USB flash drive or external drive, we suggest you always properly eject the drive. If there are still some other issues happen on the drive and lead to such an issue, you can still try to recover the data with the data recovery software. As popular data recovery software, Do Your Data Recovery for Mac can help you recover the data effectively. What’s more, you can use the software to recover data in other situations. If you want to recover deleted or lost data on Mac, feel free to download and try with the software.

DoYourData Author

Written & Updated by Justin Kenny

Justin Kenny is a writer & editor of DoYourData. He joined DoYourData in 2016 and focuses on writing articles about Windows data recovery, Mac data recovery, external device data recovery, hard drive clone, data erasure, Mac cleanup, computer issue fixes, etc. He is a super fan of Apple devices and is big on testing new digital device and system utility software.

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