Replaced hard drive in laptop and want to use it as an external

Snooples

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May 16, 2013
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I have recently replaced my 320G SATA laptop hard drive with a 500G SATA hard drive. Now windows does not detect the drive, but disk manager does. It says disk not initialized. When I do initialize the disk it says cyclic redundancy. However, as soon as I put the hard drive back into the laptop, it boots up perfectly. Am I missing something?
 

John_VanKirk

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Hi Snoples, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Could you please be as specific as possible as to which HDD you are having trouble with. I understand you have a new 500GB SATA drive, but is this the system drive that contains the OS, that you boot from, and that you cloned your older drive from, or a secondary drive you are using for data? If this is your primary C system drive, you have to clone your older drive (MS Reserved and System Partition) to it to make it bootable and operationable
 

Snooples

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May 16, 2013
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Hi John. Actually, I installed a new OS on the 500GB and I boot from this drive. However, the 320GB is the one I want to use as an external drive without any operating system just for backup & storage.
 

John_VanKirk

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Just to be sure, your new 500GB HDD boots up fine, with a clean install of ?Win-8 ? And you don't have to have the 320GB attached for the laptop to function properly? Then you want the 320 as a secondary drive for storage.

In disk management, did you select the 320, the delete all the partitions from it, create a single MBR partition type, then try reformatting it with NTFS (default settings). Funny you received a CRC error, usually that means there's a problem with the drive.

You could download the free version of HD Tune, and check the whole drive for errors, as well as the read/write speeds.

If the above is unsuccessful, there is a way to clean the drive using a command called Diskpart.

 

Snooples

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May 16, 2013
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in answer to the first part of your question, the answer is yes. I will try HD TUNE to check for errors on the disk. Although it still confuses me why the 320GB drive boots up normally.
 

John_VanKirk

Distinguished
Two things to check on. If you have two HDDs with the same assigned Volume Letter, like C, one won't show up in Windows Explorer, or there will be a conflict. With both disks connected, go to Disk Management and choose the 320 GB drive. Specifically assign it a different drive letter, like "K" for backup.
Second thing is, both will have the "Active" parameter assigned, as both are used as the Active drive. You should be able to see how both HDDs are set up in Disk Management. The 500GB HDD should have 2 Partitions, the first MS Reserved should say Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) The Second Partitions should be labeled C:, and say Healthy (Boot, Active, CrashDump, Primary Partition). If the MS Reserved Partition is not on the new 500GB drive, it may have been installed incorrectly Also, make sure in the BIOS boot order, the first HDD to boot from is the 500Gb drive.

It may be changing the drive letter of the 320GB will cause both to show up