Connected 4TB External hard drive formatted Exfat via sata and the partition is not showing up.

[BigSlice]

So I have a 4TB external drive that is formatted exFat because I used to use it on a mac. It was almost full so I took it apart and put it in my desktop and connected it via sata to the motherboard just like all of my other drives. I've used this drive through USB many times on this machine and everything was fine. Now it doesn't show up in "Computer" (Win 10) and it seems like it needs to be reformatted. When I went to "Create and format hard disk partitions" it prompted me to choose GPT or MBR. Unthinkingly I just pressed okay with GPT selected and it seems to have deleted everything. Now it just shows up as 3725.9 GB unallocated and 128 MB other. Did I just lose everything? I haven't created a "new simple volume" yet so it still needs formatted but I cannot see anything because it isn't showing up in "Computer" and I cannot give it a Drive letter yet.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, BigSlice.

Taking the drive out of its original enclosure always voids its warranty. Other than that if the drive had hardware encryption it's quite possible for you not to be able to get to your files without its original enclosure.
So looks like after taking the drive out of the enclosure you have to initialize, partition and format it if you want to be able to use it. However, this is definitely not recommended if you want to keep your files and looks like you've already initialized it and by doing that you've changed the drive's partition table.
Don't partition and format the drive if! What you need to do now is to give it a try with data recovery software and hope that one of the given option would be able to retrieve your important files. Check out this article: https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893.
If that doesn't work and your files are really valuable to you, you could give it a go with a professional solution, such as a data recovery company.

Hope that helps. Good luck!
Boogieman_WD

 

[BigSlice]

Hey there, BigSlice.

Taking the drive out of its original enclosure always voids its warranty. Other than that if the drive had hardware encryption it's quite possible for you not to be able to get to your files without its original enclosure.
So looks like after taking the drive out of the enclosure you have to initialize, partition and format it if you want to be able to use it. However, this is definitely not recommended if you want to keep your files and looks like you've already initialized it and by doing that you've changed the drive's partition table.
Don't partition and format the drive if! What you need to do now is to give it a try with data recovery software and hope that one of the given option would be able to retrieve your important files. Check out this article: https://www.lifewire.com/free-data-recovery-software-tools-2622893.
If that doesn't work and your files are really valuable to you, you could give it a go with a professional solution, such as a data recovery company.

Hope that helps. Good luck!
Boogieman_WD

Thanks for the reply, I'm currently working on data recovery but it's taking forever because it's 4TB worth of data.

1. Is there a particular software you would recommend for such a large amount of data?
2. Would there be any benefit in putting it back in its original enclosure or not considering I already initialized it.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

I hope you're able to get all the data you need. Fingers crossed!

1. Unfortunately as an official WD rep I can't really recommend any specific products and/or devices that are not under the Western Digital brand. However, I'd say that any software that's able to detect and retrieve the data should be OK.
2. I don't really think that there's going to be any difference at this point, but if you run out of options, you might as well try.