[SOLVED] 2013 HGST Touro external drive unformated after shucking

[starngerdanger]

Thought I'd decluter and remove 4tb drive from enclosure and make it internal but now it shows the partitions as unformated.
Tried taping over pin 3 but no joy.
It's fairly full and I only have an empty 2tb so I can't easily format.
Does anyone one recall what this might be caused by?
Windows 10 and Linux show same status of drive.
Thanks!

 

[Turtle Rig]

For a second there I thought you were talking about a game lol. That is funny. Grand Turismo my friend 👌😆🤷‍♀️
Can I ask what kinda connection this former external drive had? I think sometimes manufactoerers and what not do this it is just the way it is and also a connection difference. Your trying to connect eSATA and your external is probably a USB 3.0. Be happy you did not wipe the drive clean with these antics and what have you. I say put the drive back into the external and power up that way and see if everything is ok and if so backup your stuff to another drive and then worst case you might need to format it if you want it to act suddenly as a internal drive. Let me know! 😆🤷‍♀️👌🙉🤣

 

[fzabkar]

The enclosure's firmware is probably configured for a sector size of 4KB rather then 512 bytes. When you connect such a drive to a SATA port inside your computer, you expose its native 512-byte sector size and render your data inaccessible. The partition table is still readable but every other sector is out by factor of 8. You will probably find that the OS detects a 500GB partition rather than 4TB.

Can you show us the Partitions window with DMDE (freeware)? That will confirm the sector size and also tell us whether the data are encrypted (probably not). If you can see your missing partition(s), d-click it/them and expand the $Root. Do you now see your file/folder structure?

https://dmde.com/

 

[starngerdanger]

For a second there I thought you were talking about a game lol. That is funny. Grand Turismo my friend 👌😆🤷‍♀️
Can I ask what kinda connection this former external drive had? I think sometimes manufactoerers and what not do this it is just the way it is and also a connection difference. Your trying to connect eSATA and your external is probably a USB 3.0. Be happy you did not wipe the drive clean with these antics and what have you. I say put the drive back into the external and power up that way and see if everything is ok and if so backup your stuff to another drive and then worst case you might need to format it if you want it to act suddenly as a internal drive. Let me know! 😆🤷‍♀️👌🙉🤣

Yes it was USB3 and it still works if you put the adapter back on.
Yeah I guess I'll have to use it with the adapter until such a time as I can backup the data.

Thanks!

 

[starngerdanger]

The enclosure's firmware is probably configured for a sector size of 4KB rather then 512 bytes. When you connect such a drive to a SATA port inside your computer, you expose its native 512-byte sector size and render your data inaccessible. The partition table is still readable but every other sector is out by factor of 8. You will probably find that the OS detects a 500GB partition rather than 4TB.

Can you show us the Partitions window with DMDE (freeware)? That will confirm the sector size and also tell us whether the data are encrypted (probably not). If you can see your missing partition(s), d-click it/them and expand the $Root. Do you now see your file/folder structure?

https://dmde.com/

Here is the output when plugged in via USB3.

LBA:256 block: 256
OEM identifier "NTFS "
Bytes per Sector 4096
Sectors per Cluster 1
Reserved Sectors 0
Number of FATs 0
Root Dir Entries 0
Total Sectors 0
Media Descriptor F8h
Sectors per FAT 0
Sectors per Track 63
Number of Heads 255
Hidden Sectors 2048
Total Sectors 0
Not Used (0x00800080) 00800080h
Total NTFS Sectors 976753919
MFT Start Cluster 4
MFT Mirror Cluster 488376959
Clusters per FILE 1 (4096 bytes)
Clusters per INDX 1 (4096 bytes)
Serial Number (hex) 38ACC030-433A32C0h
Checksum 00000000h
Boot Signature (0xAA55) AA55h


Looks like the 4k thing is true.

Is there anything I can do that won't lose my data?

Thanks!

 

[fzabkar]

"dilworks" at hddoracle.com posted a solution for your problem, but I don't feel comfortable with it because it relies on Windows to ignore certain aspects of the boot sector.

 

[starngerdanger]

The enclosure's firmware is probably configured for a sector size of 4KB rather then 512 bytes. When you connect such a drive to a SATA port inside your computer, you expose its native 512-byte sector size and render your data inaccessible. The partition table is still readable but every other sector is out by factor of 8. You will probably find that the OS detects a 500GB partition rather than 4TB.

Can you show us the Partitions window with DMDE (freeware)? That will confirm the sector size and also tell us whether the data are encrypted (probably not). If you can see your missing partition(s), d-click it/them and expand the $Root. Do you now see your file/folder structure?

https://dmde.com/

I posted the output from dmde. What do you make of it?

 

[fzabkar]

Like you said, the sector size is 4096 bytes, so you need to access the data from inside the enclosure. If it were my data, and if I wanted to install the drive inside my PC, I would hack the partition table and boot sector. That involves editing at the byte level, not with automated procedures. In your case I would just save the data to another drive and then copy it back.. Otherwise search for the tutorial by 'dilworks".