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Hello I've been researching this for a bit and haven't found anything substantial: So I have a WD 3TB External HDD, I'm trying to convert it to a SATA drive without losing the data.

Here's some information about the drive in DMDE

EDIT: Detailed pane of the 2nd 'My Book' partition

The problems I'm having are as follows:

  1. It's formatted as an MBR which normally only supports up to 2TB. I'm guessing there's some WD drivers installed in the chip of the external case that works around this but when plugging into SATA, linux/windows straight up doesn't recognize the partition(s). EDIT: More information on #1: Why is my USB drive showing corrupted data when plugged as an internal SATA drive?

  2. I've tried Testdisk, Photorec, DiskGenius, and MiniTool Partition Wizard to recover data/partitions. These tools only let me save the data/files to another HDD. I do not want to spend $60 on a 3TB HDD just to transfer files.

  3. I can recover a 300GB NTFS partition, and a bunch of random dietpi/other linux partitions that are random af and only about 50mb. All of my files (3TB worth) are recoverable on the NTFS partition using DiskGenius and MiniTool which makes no sense to me as the partition only shows up as 300GB

There's gotta be a way to format the drive as GPT NTFS without losing data right?

  1. Can I convert the MBR partition to GPT without losing data?
  2. Can I resize the 300GB NTFS partition to 3TB without losing data?

It literally makes 0 sense how windows Diskpart loses data when resizing/deleting partitions, as theoretically the partition is stored in a separate section than the data.

Possible strategies with a nearly identical problem:

MBR may be erased from HDD - Tom's Hardware

Hard Drive Recovery (Partition size shown, but not there)

Benjamin Auquite
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  • Welcome to Superuser. I removed the first part of your last paragraph so that this post is not closed as "Off Topic" (Software and learning recommendations are very much off-topic here and will get your question closed pretty quickly.) – davidgo May 07 '22 at 21:29
  • See [this answer](https://superuser.com/a/985330/432690). Accessing the data may be possible ([example](https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/511148/108618)). Converting may be possible, but you need to post the output from `fdisk -l` or similar tool that shows the partition table using sectors or bytes as units (not KB, MiB, GB nor such). – Kamil Maciorowski May 07 '22 at 21:31
  • @davidgo thank you so much! Appreciate that man! – Benjamin Auquite May 07 '22 at 21:43
  • @KamilMaciorowski I've added a photo from DiskGenius including the available partitions and sector information. There's a ton of ext-type partitions that aren't showing up here that can be found when doing partition recovery from the Wizard. – Benjamin Auquite May 07 '22 at 21:58
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    You already found the reason. Because the block size changed and all block addresses with it, conversion is all but impossible. – Daniel B May 07 '22 at 22:11
  • @DanielB The files are all still here, is there no way to manually edit the partition table? – Benjamin Auquite May 07 '22 at 22:23
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    (1) Your DiskGenius shows CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) values, nowadays this is *so* inconvenient ("DiskRetard", I would say). (2) After recalculating to LBA it seems to me there is enough room for GPT and its backup. I could write an answer, but… (3) NTFS VBR (aka Partition Boot Sector, PBS) contains fields like "Bytes per sector" and we would probably need to adjust them (like [here](https://superuser.com/a/1674254/432690)). I'm a Linux guy. AFAIK decent Linux filesystems are better than this and don't need such tuning. I have no experience with NTFS. I guess it's *theoretically* possible. – Kamil Maciorowski May 07 '22 at 22:33
  • @KamilMaciorowski I've updated the drive/partition output using DMDE as it shows waay more useful information (and uninstalled diskgenius). – Benjamin Auquite May 07 '22 at 23:00
  • This question has been answered and solved by fzabkar here: https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/comments/ukmejf/comment/i7to3jp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 – Benjamin Auquite May 08 '22 at 22:48
  • necroing to say fzabkar's solution is still working one year later. – Benjamin Auquite Mar 07 '23 at 00:31

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There's gotta be a way to format the drive as GPT NTFS without losing data right?

No. You can only format partitions. Formating always means deleting data. Some drive (disks!) do not have a partition table. In this case one could say that you can format the drive, but this involves deleting data.

What you really want is to "repair" your disk somehow. Based on your statement "format the drive as GPT NTFS" I can only recommend you buying a new drive. Unfortunately you are currently lacking the basics so that the risk of data loss is pretty high.

  1. Can I convert the MBR partition to GPT without losing data?

In your case it is possible because the space needed for both GPT structures is not occupied by your partition.

  1. Can I resize the 300GB NTFS partition to 3TB without losing data?

There is nothing to resize. By removing your disk out of its external case you did not change your data. What is happening now is that your operating system is misinterpreting the partition table information based on a new logical sector size at the interface (512 bytes instead of 4096)

If you had tried to resize your partition you could have destroyed your data. Again: Do not try to "repair". Buy a new drive.

I do not want to spend $60 on a 3TB HDD just to transfer files.

What is the price of loosing your data?

What I can't tell is if correcting the table will be sufficient. Due to a lack of necessary hardware for tryouts I can't test if NTFS will address sectors based on the logical sector size at the interface (which should be 512 byte now) or based on its internal recording (4096 bytes).

r2d3
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