Old external Hard drive in new enclosure asking me to format the disk.

[rokio]

So i have external seagate 2tb drive that has a lose usb port and because of this it can be hard to get it to connect without playing around with the position of the cable.

So because of this i thought i would buy a new enclosure for the drive and i could just connect the drive to said new enclosure and my problems would be solved. Wrong.

When i connected the drive to the new enclosure it asked me to format the disk, i declined obviously as i want to keep all the data.

I put the drive back into the original seagate enclosure and it connected fine with everything still their on the drive.

I'm not sure what to do at this point.

The enclosure is a Inateck Aluminum USB 3.0 Hard Disk Drive Enclosure for 2.5 Inch/3.5 Inch SATA HDD and SSD, Support UASP and 10TB Drives (FE3001)

 

[USAFRet]

A lot of those drives are encrypted, via the PCB in the drive enclosure.
Take the drive out, and the new enclosure does not know how to read it.

If you can get it working in the original enclosure, copy ALL of the data off to something else, swap the drive into the new enclosure, and Format.
Then, copy the data back to it.

 

[rokio]

Was hoping that wouldn't be the case, I don't currently have the hard drive space to copy 2tb's of data.

 

[USAFRet]

Was hoping that wouldn't be the case, I don't currently have the hard drive space to copy 2tb's of data.

Unfortunately, that is the case. Pun intended.

 

[seagate_surfer]

rokio, for situations like this, it is best to have a good backup plan.

The conventional wisdom by tech experts on backups is known as the 3-2-1 method. Basically you want:

3 copies of any data you don't want to lose
2 different mediums it's stored on (so 2 different drives in your computer, for example)
1 copy kept offsite, to prevent against disaster.