External HDD to Internal formatting

[Kurt Ambrose]

I have a 4TB WB My Book external drive. I accidentally fried the power supply, so I figured I'd just open it up and use the hard drive as an internal drive using SATA cables. I've installed the drive, and my computer is reading that there is a hard drive there, but it isn't in a readable format, and it says I need to format it before I can read it. This would, of course, erase the drive, which I do not want. Is there a way to get the data off before I format it?

 

[Paperdoc]

Ask WD Tech Support for some important details. Some external HDD units were Partitioned and Formatted with non-standard methods and cannot be read unless the are installed in their host enclosures whose controllers use that format. Ask WD whether this applies to your particular unit.

The other possibility is much simpler. Sometimes the unit is Partitioned and Formatted in a completely standard way. HOWEVER, a drive of that size would have to be Partitioned using the GPT system. If you desktop is not set up to use that, it cannot be read. But you may be able to fix that. If your OS is Vista or a later version of Windows, OR if it is a recent 64-bit version of Windows, you should be able to find and install in your OS the device driver required to access disks using the GPT Partition style. Then you can access its contents. You do not need "UEFI Support" in your BIOS - that feature is required to be able to BOOT from a GPT-Partitioned drive, but not required just to access it for data.