After taking Internal HDD out of external drive, drive won't initialize

[NShukla]

Hi, a while ago I bought a 4TB Seagate external HDD because it was 20 dollars CHEAPER than the same 4TB internal drive for some reason. I loaded 3tb of data on it over time, and lately I decided to make it internal drive.

I cracked open the case carefully, and connected the drive to functional SATA ports (I've used these ports before). The drive won't initialize, and it's showing unallocated space and RAW format in Disk Management.

I panicked initially, but I went back and put it in the original enclosure and connected it back to the USB port it was in. Everything is back to normal, all files are fine!

So I'm wondering how to make the drive initialized in the SATA port without backing up my data. The reason: I don't have 3TB of space anywhere! It's my biggest data drive!

The files aren't sensitive so I'd be willing to adopt SOME level of risk in order to get things working. Please help, thanks!

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

Which external hard drive is this? Some have encryption built in which may be why you are experiencing this issue.

 

[NShukla]

This is the external:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178354

This is the drive inside:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

This is strange, that drive doesn't have encryption as far as I know so the drive shouldn't do this. I will do some searching and get back to you.

 

[NShukla]

Thanks! I appreciate it. It's worth noting that the drive shows a lot of "unallocated space" when it's connected to SATA, and 454 GB of an active, RAW partition.

 

[fzabkar]

Seagate's 3TB/4TB external drives are configured with 4KB LBAs. When you remove the drive from its enclosure, you expose its native 512e LBAs. This means that your OS now sees a 4Kn file system on a 512e physical drive, rendering your file system inaccessible. Therefore you must backup your data when the HDD is inside the enclosure.

The reason that Seagate does it this way is to enable a legacy OS such as Windows XP to work with your drive in MBR mode. When the drive is connected to a SATA port, Disk Management sees a single MBR partition. The capacity of this partition is 4TB / 8.

Therefore I would have expected that Disk Management would report a capacity of 465 GiB.

4TB / 8 = 465.7 GiB

 

[NShukla]

That's a little technical for my knowledge, but it actually makes perfect sense. Guess I'll have to borrow someone's 3TB drive! Thanks for the explanation.

Quick edit: Does that mean I can't use the disk at all as an internal drive, or does it simply mean I have to reformat it?

 

[fzabkar]

You can repurpose the drive as a regular internal HDD simply by repartitioning and reformatting it.