Full external drive shows up as unallocated when shucked

[Bill Kensington]

Hi all, I have a small problem.

 

I have an 7 year old 1 TB HP SimpleSave external hard drive. It's entirely full, and I was trying to back up all the data since the drive is pretty old. Unfortunately it only has a USB 2.0 connection so 1 TB is taking over 7 hours. I shucked it so I can install it in my case and transfer everything over faster, and its a generic WD Green drive, but when I install it in my tower and boot up my system the drive shows up as unallocated. Obviously I don't want to initialize it since that will reformat it.

 

So my question is, how can I get my PC to see it as an internal hard drive without formatting it and losing all my data. Or am I stuck copying everything off of it at 35 mb/s...

 

Thanks.

[ManyCoresGuy]

What is this term "shucked" mean? As to your question, was it recognized normally when plugged into usb? If it was you can buy a cheap usb 3.0 external enclosure and that should help with the speeds. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

If you put it back in its original housing, does it show up just fine?

[Bill Kensington]

7 minutes ago, ManyCoresGuy said:

What is this term "shucked" mean? As to your question, was it recognized normally when plugged into usb? If it was you can buy a cheap usb 3.0 external enclosure and that should help with the speeds. 

By shucked, I mean I took it out of its retail external enclosure and plugged it into my case using a sata and power cable. And yes, it works perfectly fine when plugged into USB normally. I tried plugging it into USB 3.0 with a third party cheap external enclosure and still the same problem, shows up as unallocated in disk management.

 

7 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

If you put it back in its original housing, does it show up just fine?

Yes, if I put it back in its original housing it works fine. Even a third party USB 3.0 external dock doesn't work because I thought maybe it was a problem with my motherboard connectors at first.

[ManyCoresGuy]

5 minutes ago, Bill Kensington said:

By shucked, I mean I took it out of its retail external enclosure and plugged it into my case using a sata and power cable. And yes, it works perfectly fine when plugged into USB normally. I tried plugging it into USB 3.0 with a third party cheap external enclosure and still the same problem, shows up as unallocated in disk management.

 

Yes, if I put it back in its original housing it works fine. Even a third party USB 3.0 external dock doesn't work because I thought maybe it was a problem with my motherboard connectors at first.

Hmm, seems like its isolated to the way the drive interfaces with the controller. If i where you, i would just transfer the data using the old enclosure even though it will be painfully slow rather than risk losing the data. Once your data is transferred then go ahead and install it inside your pc and reformat.

[Blatcher2]

3 minutes ago, Bill Kensington said:

By shucked, I mean I took it out of its retail external enclosure and plugged it into my case using a sata and power cable. And yes, it works perfectly fine when plugged into USB normally. I tried plugging it into USB 3.0 with a third party cheap external enclosure and still the same problem, shows up as unallocated in disk management.

 

Yes, if I put it back in its original housing it works fine. Even a third party USB 3.0 external dock doesn't work because I thought maybe it was a problem with my motherboard connectors at first.

A while back they started making external drives impossible to remove since people were just picking them up for cheap and stripping the drives out. I would just copy everything over on USB 2 overnight. It may be using a proprietary firmware on the drive/controller. If you can salvage the drive after backing up your data it would be nice to have as an internal drive.

[Bill Kensington]

4 minutes ago, ManyCoresGuy said:

Hmm, seems like its isolated to the way the drive interfaces with the controller. If i where you, i would just transfer the data on the old enclosure even though it will be painfully slow rather than risk losing the data. Once your data is transferred then go ahead and install inside your pc and reformat.

Looks like that's what I'll have to do. I can always mess around with it after the data is safely copied over. I was thinking of trying this program after everything was done, do you think it's worth it?

 

https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/fix-unallocated-external-hard-drive.html

 

3 minutes ago, Blatcher2 said:

A while back they started making external drives impossible to remove since people were just picking them up for cheap and stripping the drives out. I would just copy everything over on USB 2 overnight. It may be using a proprietary firmware on the drive/controller. If you can salvage the drive after backing up your data it would be nice to have as an internal drive.

Makes sense, look's like I'll have to simply take it slow. As an aside, what do you think of this program. Was thinking of trying it after the data was copied just to see if it worked:

 

https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/fix-unallocated-external-hard-drive.html

 

Thanks again!

[ManyCoresGuy]

2 minutes ago, Blatcher2 said:

A while back they started making external drives impossible to remove since people were just picking them up for cheap and stripping the drives out. I would just copy everything over on USB 2 overnight. It may be using a proprietary firmware on the drive/controller. If you can salvage the drive after backing up your data it would be nice to have as an internal drive.

I second this @Blatcher2. Most likely it was intentionally designed to behave this way if removed from the enclosure.

[Blatcher2]

6 minutes ago, Bill Kensington said:

Makes sense, look's like I'll have to simply take it slow. As an aside, what do you think of this program. Was thinking of trying it after the data was copied just to see if it worked:

 

https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/fix-unallocated-external-hard-drive.html

The software wasn't designed to allow the drive for internal use but rather help in the case of: File system and internal device error, Improper operations, Virus attack, Outdated disk driver.

 

Its worth a shot, though it may be more complicated to get it to work.

[Bill Kensington]

Just now, Blatcher2 said:

The software wasn't designed to allow the drive for internal use but rather help in the case of: File system and internal device error, Improper operations, Virus attack, Outdated disk driver.

 

Its worth a shot, though it may be more complicated to get it to work.

Sounds good, I'll report back here with my results just in case it might help someone else.

[Blatcher2]

6 minutes ago, Bill Kensington said:

Sounds good, I'll report back here with my results just in case it might help someone else.

Be sure to tag us so we see your response.

[LunaP0n3]

17 hours ago, Blatcher2 said:

A while back they started making external drives impossible to remove since people were just picking them up for cheap and stripping the drives out.

I assume you're referring to the practice of soldering the USB to SATA adapter directly to the drive?

[Blatcher2]

4 hours ago, LunaP0n3 said:

I assume you're referring to the practice of soldering the USB to SATA adapter directly to the drive?

That's one popular method. Evil Corporations

[Bill Kensington]

@Blatcher2 @ManyCoresGuy @Mira Yurizaki

 

So I went ahead and tried the recovery program. It recognized the drive and scanned it to recover the data, but all the data it did find was the wrong format. For example, I had over 300 MKV files on the drive ranging from 2-3GB, those all were recovered as Shockwave Flash Files that I couldn't open at all.

 

So yeah, program doesn't work. Just copied everything over and then reformatted it, now it works perfectly fine.