Converted external drive to internal, not showing up in my computer?

diw321

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I have a 3 TB Western Digital My Book drive that I copied about 1.2 TB of data to in its external casing via USB 2.0, I then popped it out of the case and added it as another drive within my computer, it now doesn't show up as a drive in my computer and under disk management it says it is unallocated and wants me to partition, losing my data. How can I access this drive and the data I copied to it?
My Other Drives are as follows:
1 TB WD Green HDD (Boot Drive)
1 TB WD Green HDD (Data)
3 TB WD Green HDD (Data)
1.5 TB Seagate HDD (Data)

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.
 
Solution
When you switched it from MBR to GPT I'm sure it wreaked havoc with the file system. Sorry, but I'm not sure how to recover from that scenerio.

diw321

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I have put it back in the USB casing, and it still shows as unallocated space. In disk management it asks if I want to use MBR or GPT, originally I chose GPT (after I moved it into my case) Did my choosing GPT somehow corrupt the data? (I did NOT format).
 
It appears that the disk, or at least the partition information, got corrupted. If you look through the Forums for "Disk Recovery," you will see several pieces of software that will scan your disk and try to recover the files on it. Scan is free, but if it finds files you will have to pay to unlock the recovery feature.

The process can take from several hours to several days, depending on how bad the problem is.
 

diw321

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Thank you for the info, I have recovered the actual files, but the files names were not present, is it possible to recover them? I assume the MBR was compromised?
Thanks!
 
This has always been a limitation/restriction of MBR.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

Both the partition length and partition start address are stored as 32-bit quantities. Because the sector size is 512 (29) bytes, this implies that either the maximum size of a partition or the maximum start address (both in bytes) cannot exceed 2.19 TB or 2 TiB−512 bytes (2,199,023,255,040 bytes or 4,294,967,295 (232−1) sectors × 512 (29) bytes per sector). Alleviating this capacity limitation is one of the prime motivations for the development of the GUID partition table (GPT).

Edit:
or take it from Tom's. ;)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/HDD-3TB-Host-Bus-Adapter-SATA,11494.html
 

diw321

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Thank you to you both for the help with this.

When I did the recovery it was attached externally using the WD enclosure.
I now have it back in my system as an internal drive and it shows up as unallocated, and prompts me to make a GPT partition, which is what I did in the first place (The first time I moved it from the enclosure to internal drive). I am able to see the actual files when I recover using Piriform Recuva, but the files names are gone, they are all named File0001.AVI and File0002.AVI, etc. It looks like the record of the files names was deleted, is it possible to recover this? I had about 250,000 files on that drive, and now they are without names.

Thanks in advance!
 

diw321

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Capture-2.jpg


This is my drive layout, "C" is boot, "H" is the 3 TB with the deleted files I want, "I" is where the "H" recovery files reside (W/O file names) and "M" is other data.
Again, these are all internal.
Win 7 Ult. 64 bit didn't have any problem seeing them.
 

diw321

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Afraid of that, thanks. On another sweep of Recuva, I did manage to recover a file called $MFT and $Logfile as well as some more $... files is this perhaps helpful to me? where do I put them?