[SOLVED] System wants Drives to be Initialized, Despite Being Initialized

larghaz

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Over the weekend, I upgraded my CPU, Motherboard and some drives to new ones. I now have four SSD's from the former two. One of the new ones is an NVME, which I use as a primary OS and applications drive. The second is a 500GB ssd that wasn't replaced. The other two are 4TB SSD's to replace the 2TB drives I had which is where I installed games, kept mod files and housed various video captured clips respectively.

Before actually going through the build, while I was waiting for the CPU and Motherboard to arrive, I copied the contents of the 2TB HDD's to the new 4TB SSD's. Now that the upgrade and build is done and running pretty ok the 500GB ssd is detected and all files are intact, but these two bigger SSD's aren't showing up on the File Explorer. In fact, when I go into Management, I can see them both with 1.6TB worth of unallocated space each. I right-click on them and every option but 'Properties' is greyed out ( View: https://i.imgur.com/7D8EEPd.png
). I even looked in the BIOS, and they actually do show the correct capacity there.

Just this afternoon, I had to redo the cables since I forgot to plug some stuff for the RGB, so I decided to see what happens if I plug the new SSD's to my laptop through USB using https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B011M8YACM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1, which is also what I had to use to copy the data from the old drives. The laptop detected both drives without any problems.

Now, I try the same with the bigger 3.5" drives on both the PC and the laptop, and both devices want them initialized. When I try to do so, it gives a hardware error message again, on both PC and laptop.
So I want to ask what my options are in this situation? I of course want to be able to use the SSD's in their full 4TB capacity, and not lose any of their data inside. The last resort solution I'm can think of is to initialize and format the two 3.5" HDD's, copy the data from the SSD's into them on the laptop. But then I'm stuck with not being able to initialize the SSD's or the HDD's at all. If there's a different, better solution, I would much rather have that.
 

larghaz

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OK then...

Assuming there is NO data on these.
In Disk Management, DELETE the leftmost partition.
This should leave one large space.
Right click, and New Simple Volume.
That's the thing though, there should be data on both 4TB drives, at least 1.5TB of data each. If they didn't, and the options weren't greyed out, I would've done so.

But right clicking the left most partitions on both the 4TB's have the "New Simple Volume" and all other options greyed out: View: https://i.imgur.com/K49gsdq.png


Same when right clicking the unallocated partition.
View: https://imgur.com/K49gsdq
 

larghaz

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From the top part of your Disk Management window, both Disk 2 and Disk 3...both 3726.02TB , with 1678.02 Unallocated....both show 100% free space.
Nothing on them.

Unless we're talking about different physical drives.
As I said on the original post, I took them out, plugged them into the laptop through the Sabrent USB / Sata adapter, and it read the files, showed me the data I copied from the original 2TB HDD's/
 

larghaz

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Then I would suspect an inconsistency between sector sizes with the external connections.
512b vs 4kb.

Does this data exist anywhere else?
They're also on the original 2TB HDD's that both the PC and the laptop wants initialized when I used the Sabrent Adapter. When I do try to initialize those two drives, I get a "Hardware Error" message.

Trying to find a solution where I don't have to reformat anything
 
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larghaz

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larghaz

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Yes, the original enclosure is/was configured with a sector size of 4KB. You will still see your data if you d-click the NTFS(4K) volumes and expand the $Root.
I double clicked the "G" Volume name, and this showed up: View: https://imgur.com/IfBIoE3

I cancelled the promt that followed in fear of messing something up.

I plugged in one of the old 2TB HDD
to the Sata / USB adapter to try to see what it would do, got this: View: https://imgur.com/lYtnp01

Double did the same to the 500GB drive, and it did show the contents of the drive though.
 
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popatim

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Both drives have the same data?

yes - I would keep one in the PC and the other one in the enclosure. initialize/clean the one in the PC and then copy the data from the external into the internal. Verify the data is not corrupted. (2gb will take a long time)

Then install the other one into the PC and initialize/clean it and copy the data from the good one to the newly initialized one. Verify the dat on this one as well.
 

larghaz

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Both drives have the same data?

yes - I would keep one in the PC and the other one in the enclosure. initialize/clean the one in the PC and then copy the data from the external into the internal. Verify the data is not corrupted. (2gb will take a long time)

Then install the other one into the PC and initialize/clean it and copy the data from the good one to the newly initialized one. Verify the dat on this one as well.
Yeah, each 4TB SSD has the same content as a corresponding 2TB HDD.

I just removed the SSD's from the PC, and reconnected them to the system using the Sata / USB adapter, and they work perfectly fine. Found that there were some files on both HDD's that I forgot to copy over though.

Just plugged in both the HDD's internally, and now they're both detected.

Used DMDE on the HDD's, they don't have the 4K:
View: https://imgur.com/GSvttWF

View: https://imgur.com/pqrWq16
 
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larghaz

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The current USB-SATA adapter has a sector size of 512 bytes. The previous adapter had a sector size of 4096 bytes.
Seems that way, so I guess, now that I've copied the data that I wasn't able to copy from the HDD's to the SDD's. I just have to take out the 2TB drives, plug them into the adapter, initialize them there, copy from the SDD into them, put the SDD's into PC, initialize / format, then copy from the HDD back to the SDD?

But then, that brings me back to options to initialize / format or even delete partitions being greyed out, and the hardware error messages. Or does the difference in environment play a part in this problem too?
 
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larghaz

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