[SOLVED] SATA HDD headaches

[TheFalcro]

Hello all,

I have an external (SATA to USB 3.0) 1TB 5400 RPM HDD Manufacturer is unknown. I bought the drive as an external but now want to use it internally. I removed it from it's little Carele 2.5 case and everything looks as expected has standard Power and SATA connections. the drive comes preformatted in ex-fat and the seller stated that it can only be used in ex-fat. I have not changed the formatting of the drive. When it is installed in my PC it shows in Device Manager as an unknown device and looking at propeties it says it is a disk drive. When I go into Disk Managment and I try to initialize it I get a pop up message saying;

Virtual disk Manager: A device which does not exixt was specified.

At this point the drive disappears from Disk Management but not from Device Manager, very strange indeed.

I then tried in AOMEI to initialize the disk and I get the following message;

Sorry, the current operation has been canceled!
Information Code: 45
Description:Failed to initialize this disk.

What does the Information Code mean? Please refer to: https://www.disk-partition.com/help/errorcode.html

This is the explanation of what Information Code: 45 means from AOMEI's website

Error Code: 45

Error description: Failed to initialize this disk. After adding a brand new disk to your computer , you need to initialize it before using it. It will automatically initialized when a brand new disk is partitioned by using Partition Assistant. But there are a few unknown reasons leading to the error. There is no information on this drive so I can format/wipe/ whatever I need to do with no worries about data loss.

I have tried everything I can think of including all available SATA ports including my internal ESATA port and I can not get this to work in my PC. It will work in its case or in my EZ-Dock but not connected directly to the SATA inside the computer.

Just as information if you are thinking that the Carele enclosure has some kind of encryption I put an old 1TB HDD into it and it works flawlwessly so I don't think this is a hardware encryption issue unless it is on the drive itself. I have no idea how harware encryption works but it seems to me that a chip on the adapter pcb would be the logical place for it to start. I am losing hair now so any and all help and suggestions is appreciated.

 

[jojesa]

Try using diskpart to clean the disk, then format it again.

 

[TheFalcro]

Try using diskpart to clean the disk, then format it again.

Thankyou for the reply I have just attempted this and everything went perfectly until I tried to creat the partition at that point I get the following message

Diskpart has encountered and error: A device which does not exist was specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.

I don't know which event log I am supposed to look in to see what that says. this is well beyond my experience level lol I am ot afraid to learn but definitely don't want to brick my system lol

 

[jojesa]

Can you post the list of commands used with Diskpart?

 

[TheFalcro]

Can you post the list of commands used with Diskpart?

Here are my mouse clicks and key storkes as I enter them

Windows 10 search ( left mouse click)
in search bar:
cmd
Right click Command Prompt app
left click Run as administrator

in command prompt:
diskpart
List Disk
Select disk X (in my case it is Disk 2)
List disk (second time to insure the * is on the disk I want)
clean
System Message:
operation completed successfully

in command prompt:

Create partition primary
System Message:
Diskpart has encountered and error: A device which does not exist was specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.

 

[jojesa]

Exit diskpart and try to format the drive with Disk Manager
I have seen that message when a disk is failing or there is a poor data connection.
Check the SATA cable or SATA port.

 

[TheFalcro]

Exit diskpart and try to format the drive with Disk Manager
I have seen that message when a disk is failing or there is a poor data connection.
Check the SATA cable or SATA port.

Excellent I will do that and reply the results. In theory this is a brand new disk so it shouldn't be disk failure. The Drive was free so I am doing this more just to solve the mystery. Thank you for your suggestions.

 

[USAFRet]

Excellent I will do that and reply the results. In theory this is a brand new disk so it shouldn't be disk failure. The Drive was free so I am doing this more just to solve the mystery. Thank you for your suggestions.

Brand new does not always mean functional.
I had a 5 week old WD Green drive die. Went from apparently great to dead in 36 hours.

 

[TheFalcro]

Brand new does not always mean functional.

Thank you! This is absolutely true and I have not ruled this out simply because it is new, it could be an internal hardware issue. The drive does spin so that is a plus and it is recognized as a drive in my EZ-Dock as well as in it's own case. It simply does not want to be recognized as an internal drive. I have the time to spend figuring it out and I get to learn new things at the same time. I appreciate all input shared

 

[TheFalcro]

Excellent I will do that and reply the results. In theory this is a brand new disk so it shouldn't be disk failure. The Drive was free so I am doing this more just to solve the mystery. Thank you for your suggestions.

OK I have two working drives in the PC and I have 4 total SATA ports
Ports 1 and 2 are SATA III ports 3 is an ESATA port and 4 is a SATA II port.

I am currently running my Intel Pro 2500 series SSD 180GB boot drive on port 1 and my 7400 RPM 500GB HDD on port 4

I moved my WD HDD to the ESATA port and rebooted both drives were still recognized... Power off
connected the unrecognised drive to port 4 and booted the machine the drive can be seen in device manager but still cannot be initialized/ formatted etc.... Power off
Moved the unrecognized drive to the ESATA and put the WD back on port 4 and botted the PC results were exactly the same as previous

All ports aapear to be wroking properly I even disconnected all drives and move the SSD boot drive to the ESATA port the PC was slow to boot but did boot normally once the boot actually started.

 

[TheFalcro]

Brand new does not always mean functional.
I had a 5 week old WD Green drive die. Went from apparently great to dead in 36 hours.

Here is the latest update.

I have tested the ports and all are working fine, I have tested (swapped) the SATA cables and they are all fine.
I now have the drive uninstalled from the PC case and it is in my EZ-DOCK recognised and ready to hold what ever info I may wish to put on this 1TB drive, I am wondering if I should try wiping the drive and reformatting it to see fi that will allow it to work in my PC maybe there is some sort of encryption on the drive that only allows it to work when it goes through USB. The encryption can't be part of the original 2.5 drive enclosure that has a different drive installed in it and that drive works fine. plus this is checking out perfectly in my EZ-DOCK with no bad sectors and no errors when I run the tests, I am thinking that maybe a wipe opf the drive and a reformat might get rid of the potential encryption that my be present. Opinions?? like I have said this is a brand new drive that ended up being free to me so I am willling to risk the loss if something I do bricks it.

 

[USAFRet]

Here is the latest update.

1. Ensure your data on those drives exists elsewhere.
2. Verify, file by file, that your data exists elsewhere.
3. Play with the dries and configs all you want.

Reformat, remove from the external, wipe, create new volumes, encrypt, decrypt....whatever.
It may be anything. Or nothing wrong with it.
Any or all of the above may do the trick. Or it may be completely dead.


All you're really trying to do is get it to a usable state.

 

[TheFalcro]

3. <<<snip>>>

Reformat, remove from the external, wipe, create new volumes, encrypt, decrypt....whatever.
It may be anything. Or nothing wrong with it.
Any or all of the above may do the trick. Or it may be completely dead.


All you're really trying to do is get it to a usable state.

Thank you for the reply and the excellent suggestions. I think that I agree with the course of action. there is no data to lose on this drive so I am going to do a standard wipe and run that twice then I will reformat the drive and try installing it internally agian and see if anythign changes.

 

[srlake314]

LOL, I noticed a good deal of the suggestions are exactly what you'd done and none of them work.

I too have had issues with a brand new pc, motherboard, etc. I have 2 SSD m2's NVMe that are working perfectly fine, including in UEFI/BIOS. The new WD 4TB Black edition SATA seems to not appear at all in UEFI/BIOS. It does however, SOMETIMES appear in disk mgmt and hard Disk Sentinel.

I've done every step you mentioned in your initial post. CMD/DOS: diskpart utility, cleaned(that worked), but as soon as I do any function of writing to the disk be it partition, the disk actually just disappears and I get the message, "A device which does not exist was specified."

Cables, swapped, new cables, all tightly plugged in, power nice and tight, even tried different power cable and slots in Power supply. I tried all the SATA ports, and still nothing, and not just one HDD. I even have an older HDD SATA that is NEVER seen., EVER. So that's really weird. it actually has data on it too.

So I'm working with ASUS support right now and it could be a motherboard/SATA issue, but I sure as heck hope not as that's a HUGE pain to swap out with everything else so nicely connected 🙁.

I was hoping there was a way to force Windows 10(pro), to see the bloody things or some setting in Bios. I have purchased a SATA to USB with power to test the drive externally from the SATA plugs and see what happens.

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wifi. Motherboard.
Western Digital Black Edition 4TB SATA drive.
Toshiba HDD 1TB SATA drive.

 

[TheFalcro]

UPDATE

After trying a wipe and reformat I had another failure at 236GB of the wipe the process just stopped. The wipe process was trying to continue but for some reason could not. So I decided to open the drive up and peek. the arm was definitely stuck on the platter. So in conclusion it was/is a faulty drive and is now in the trash can. I want to thank everyone for their help and advice I got to learn some new things and it was a great experience overall. Sometimes stuff is simpy broken.