Problem turning External HDD into Internal

[Chrislw324]

I had an external hard drive that I wanted to get off my desk. I took it out of the enclosure and made it internal. 

But now when I go into disk management, it asks me to initialize the disk every time and the entire HDD shows up as unallocated.

 

Is there any way to fix this problem? It's not a huge problem since I have the data backed up elsewhere, but I'd like to get the data back if possible.

[Guest]

Can you put it back into tge enclosure? Then if it is in the enclosure do a data recovery.

There is a reason external hdd's are cheaper, most of them even have some weird proprietary connectors so you couldn't use them internally.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Often the drive enclosures encrypt the data. Just format the drive and restore backups.

[Chrislw324]

I actually already tossed the enclosure. 

 

Oh well. Good thing I backed up.

[Kalm_Traveler]

1 hour ago, Some Random Member said:

Can you put it back into tge enclosure? Then if it is in the enclosure do a data recovery.

There is a reason external hdd's are cheaper, most of them even have some weird proprietary connectors so you couldn't use them internally.

literally every external drive enclosure I've opened up had a normal SATA HDD inside, with an adapter cable/circuit board plugged into it's SATA connectors to connect the external power and data ports.

 

OP - I agree just format the drive completely and start from scratch - I've used several HDD's that were originally sold as external USB drives as internal over the years. If you format it from scratch it will work exactly as you want it to.