Question Unable to access Sata HDD when moving to dock.

vampirev

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Apr 9, 2009
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I previously had 4 external hdds that were all individually powered etc.

Anyway,

Issues is on my new sata dock(s) I can see the drive in disk manager, but now they are listed at about 50% capacity. and the other 50% shows unallocated

View: https://imgur.com/0PWBDCE


All my options with the disk are greyed out. Whether clicking the disk itself, the healthy partition or the unallocated space.

This is now the same for all 4 drives.
They don't even show up in Explorer and I can't assign a drive letter due to greyed out issue.

So 3 out of the 4 drives show without issue if I use the old sd card interfaces I ripped out of the external drive., ie old western digital / seagate etc. (not designed for opening :))

Now I'm starting to think there's some kind of proprietry bs on the sata driver or something...It doesn't make sense...

View: https://imgur.com/MVuywSe


In this example the drive is a Western Digital 4.0TB 64mb cache WD40EZRX-00SPEB0

Windows 10 BTW

Any ideas?
Thank you
 
The problem is that your drives came from enclosures whose USB-SATA bridge firmware was configured for a 4KB sector size. Your new dock has a 512B sector size. Essentially you now have a 4Kn file system on a 512B storage device. That's why your data are inaccessible.

See https://goughlui.com/2013/10/02/experiment-usb-to-sata-bridge-chips-and-2tb-drives/


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vampirev

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Apr 9, 2009
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Thanks, I've pretty much come to terms with data loss (but I have 98% of it elsewhere anyway. In terms of reformatting I tried using the old SATA interface to the point where I could access the drive and changed the sector size to 512B but the same issue occurs, I'm guessing this bit is user error?

Edit

Got one working by using Easeus and converting to GPT.

Working through the rest now....but it's fighting me the whole way
 
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If you only need to recover a small number of files, DMDE's free version may do it for you.

Double-click the SPARE partition and expand the Root. You should now see your file/folder tree.

Tick the desired folder or files and select Recover from the menu.

There is a way to manually edit the partition table and boot sectors, but this is not easy to explain via a forum.

Here is an alternative procedure which may work for you, but I confess that I don't understand how the author was able to access his data without editing the boot sectors.

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=1832
 
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vampirev

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You are a champion, thank you. This whole process has been doing my head in. I now have 3 of ther 4 drives working and recovery of the other files is in progress. I cannot thank you enough :)