[SOLVED] Working drives disappearing

[deecemobile]

Hello,
I had a working internal 4 TB drive that I was upgrading to a 8TB.
I plugged the 8TB in as external first to USB 3.0. My computer did not recognize it. It was showing as a GPT protected partition. All the menu options in Disk management were greyed out. I had to clean it with diskpart then I was able to format it and get it working with Disk Management.
I copied the contents of the internal 4TB to the external 8TB.
Then I removed the internal 4TB and replaced with the 8TB making it internal. My computer did not recognize the 8TB now, again. It was unallocated in disk management and GPT protected partition. All options for the drive were greyed out in disk management. I had to clean and format it again to get it working.
So I needed to get the contents from the 4TB again! Guess what, when I plugged in the 4TB into USB 3.0 (because it is now an external disk), my computer would not recognize it. It was unallocated space too. GPT protected partition too. All menu options greyed out! Fortunately I keep backups so I was able to copy the data over again. No data lost. But my sanity was lost for a bit...

Can anyone explain what went wrong here and how I would avoid this in the future? Why would working drives lose their partition configs, etc when they are moved around? I shut my pc down everytime I move a drive .

 

[fzabkar]

The external enclosure may be configured with a different sector size, often 4096 bytes. Alternatively, some enclosures automatically encrypt the data.

Which brand of enclosure do you have?

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE (freeware disc editor)?

 

[deecemobile]

The external enclosure may be configured with a different sector size, often 4096 bytes. Alternatively, some enclosures automatically encrypt the data.

Which brand of enclosure do you have?

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE (freeware disc editor)?

Both disks are Seagate Barracuda. Cheap stuff.

Partitions screenshot here (couldn't insert link) : https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ag_Qz0xa46vrmesdWpFGWLI-LZCLfA?e=3pEyH4

Never used DMDE before. Not sure how to use it at this point.

Thanks!

 

[fzabkar]

Your DMDE screen shot confirms that your enclosure is configured for a sector size of 4KB. It is not encrypted.

Basically this means that you cannot access the data via SATA if you have partitioned and formatted the drive via USB, and vice versa. Choose one environment or the other, and then stick with it. Or buy an enclosure that is configured for 512-byte sectors.

 

[deecemobile]

Your DMDE screen shot confirms that your enclosure is configured for a sector size of 4KB. It is not encrypted.

Basically this means that you cannot access the data via SATA if you have partitioned and formatted the drive via USB, and vice versa. Choose one environment or the other, and then stick with it. Or buy an enclosure that is configured for 512-byte sectors.

Thanks you

 

[popatim]

Nice. See below to 'Solve' this thread.