Question Two external HDDs have exchanged ID info and now report the wrong capacities ?

Aug 11, 2021
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Months ago I had problems with external USB drives disappearing from my system. Often times, rebooting fixed it... for a while at least. But on one occasion, I couldn't get a drive to show up, so I wanted to switch USB ports. I tried to use "Safely remove hardware", but it wouldn't eject the drive. I got frustrated and unplugged it anyway.

Plugging it back in did not cause it to show up, so I switched off the computer. After I booted the PC back up, both drives showed up. However, the drives had switched device info with each other! I now have a 5TB Samsung (Seagate) drive that only shows 186GB, and a 200 GB (186GB) Seagate drive that shows 5TB capacity.

Yesterday I finally got around to attempting to fix them again. I have tried using Diskpart to clean, then re-initialize both disks. But even when the disks are not initialized, they each show the incorrect sizes. I was able to overwrite the disk ID of the smaller drive to it's original ID (I think), but the reported capacity remains the same as before (5TB).

I was on chat with a Seagate rep, but that went nowhere.

The computer they were attached to when this happened is running Windows Server 2012. They were both attached to a PCI USB 3.0 card at the time. When connected to my laptop running Windows 10 they still report incorrect capacities, so the problem follows the drives. So either something on each disc got overwritten, or something in the enclosures ?

I'm lost at this point.
 
Aug 11, 2021
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You're right, it doesn't make sense. But it is what happened.

One is a Samsung D3 Station. The other is a Seagate 2TB internal drive that I put into an enclosure several years ago. I'll have to check on the model (though I doubt it matters).

I'm trying to discover where the identifying information is heals [held ? ], and how to switch them back!

This is like Freaky Friday.
 
Aug 11, 2021
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So no ideas? I'll remove them from the enclosures and try connecting them directly.
It's frustrating, not only because of the loss of capacity, but if it happened in one direction, logically it should be possible to switch them back.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Have not heard of that. I assume it's a free disk info application for Windows? I'll search for it and try to get back here in a day or two.
Thanks!
 
Aug 11, 2021
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I decided to open the external cases of the two drives. The answer (probably a surprise to nobody): Operator error.
Apparently I had physically switched the two drives in their cases last year (maybe two years ago?), and stupidly not marked the outsides with this info.

Dont know why I did it. I remember my drives started to disappear from windows around that time. I had removed the Samsung (Seagate) drive from it's case and installed it internally before that. I probably decided to remove it from the computers case for troubleshooting and for some reason put it into a different USB drive. No excuses.

I recently replaced a SATA power supply splitter cable. Hopefully that will stop drives from disappearing from Windows. We'll see.

Sorry to bother everyone.