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I just recently purchased a a 4TB Backup Plus and installed about 1.5GB worth of data. I connected it using the USB 3.0 input on my motherboard. Works fine.

I then decided to use the bare drive itself, internally. So I took apart the external and opened it up. I removed the HDD and installed it in my tower. When I powered on the PC (Windows 8.1 Pro), and tried to open the drive, it gave me the:

This drive must be formatted, blah, blah, blah…

Then:

…the volume does not contain a recognized file system, blah, blah…

I’ve unplugged it from the tower (Desktop) and used the bottom adapter which housed the external drive and connected it using the USB 3.0 again and it works fine. It just won’t work internally using the SATA III ports.

The drive model is ST4000dm000-1f2168 and my file system is NTFS. When I first plugged it in using the USB 3.0, I did a full format.

Giacomo1968
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  • What filesystem is the drive using? – cutrightjm Jan 07 '14 at 06:48
  • http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338, this is the drive but it's housed in an external box.....http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178111 –  Jan 07 '14 at 14:10
  • Yes, i have plenty of power. Corsair AX860 –  Jan 07 '14 at 14:11
  • I'm having the same exact problem with a 3 TB Seagate Backup Plus Desktop drive. Inside the USB enclosure it works, but when connected directly using SATA it's unreadable. Moreover, using DISKMGMT.MSC the hard drive appears as having 3 partitions (349,31 GB of "RAW" data and two unassigned partitions of 1698,68 GB and 746,52 GB). This information is completely WRONG, since the drive in the USB enclosure works as a single NTFS partition (2794,52 GB). How come it's shown like that when connected through SATA?! Sadly, it seems no one knows the solution, since the OP wrote his question 2 years ago – OMA Oct 12 '15 at 00:07
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    I think here is the answer http://superuser.com/a/866404/270195 – clhy Dec 17 '15 at 18:38
  • @The_IT_Guy_You_Don't_Like That answer should be the canonical answer to this and similar “Larger than 2TB drive works in USB enclosure but not via direct SATA” questions. – Giacomo1968 Dec 17 '15 at 18:46
  • @OMA [This is the answer.](http://superuser.com/a/866404/270195) – Giacomo1968 Dec 17 '15 at 18:47
  • @OMA that's what I've commented :) – clhy Dec 17 '15 at 18:52
  • @MariusMatutiae Did you [just go on a serial down voting spree on some of my answers and questions](http://superuser.com/users/167207/jakegould?tab=reputation)? The reason I ask is I commented and down voted [your answer here which you just deleted](http://superuser.com/a/1014881/167207). This question is over a year old, came up in a review queue with a non-answer and I was simply tagging it as a dupe since there is a great answer that actually fully explains this issue. But you have 20,000+ reputation and you behave like this? Past belief. – Giacomo1968 Dec 17 '15 at 19:12
  • @MariusMatutiae Not to mention, the Stack Exchange system is designed to detect down voting sprees like the one I believe you just engaged on. And what happens—if you don’t know—is the down votes are reversed and your behavior is noted. So good luck with that! – Giacomo1968 Dec 17 '15 at 19:25

1 Answers1

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It's not saying that the partition isn't recognized. It's saying you have to initialize the drive. This is because the WD bridge that the drive plugs into uses some of the space on the drive for it's firmware. The hardware then sets the first part of the drive a little ahead of the start. It's like raid cards that handle their own table layouts. You could copy the data off the drive by using HxD to find where the partition table starts and then using something like DD to start reading the data into a file from that point onwards, but that's kind of a waist of time. It might also be possible to have DD offset when it's inside the computer. I wouldn't suggest it if you don't have a backup. DD is known as Disk Destroyer for a good reason.

Remember, this is setting the beginning of the drive, not the first partition. So swapping the drive either way will cause trouble.

If you want to use the drive as both an internal and external drive you'll need to purchase an after market USB 3.0/eSata bridge and put the drive in that instead. You'll still have to copy the data off the drive first.

Kayot
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  • What about this: http://superuser.com/a/985330/100853 ? Is there a way to find out if the reason for trouble is what you're stating or what is linked to in this comment? – Daniel F Dec 17 '15 at 19:52
  • TestDisk partition recovery if you're using Linux.That will show any partitions, though it's been years since I used a non-after market enclosure. Each one does it's own thing and assumes the user will never remove it from it's enclosure.Drives bigger than 2TB have to be formatted as GPT, but Windows 8.1 comes with GPT support out of the box so this wouldn't be an issue unless the enclosure is doing something wonky with the drive layout. It's possible the enclosure is running a proprietary partitioning scheme. If you want to know, look at the header in anything that can get direct drive access – Kayot Dec 17 '15 at 20:12