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4TB Internal hard drive removed from USB casing doesn't show up in Windows.

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  • Windows
  • Storage
  • Hard Drives
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November 12, 2013 12:12:42 PM

I have a 4TB Hitachi Touro DX3 USB 3.0 drive used on Windows 7 64-bit. It's NTFS and it's working fine and I've got files on it. However when I remove the drive from the casing and use it as an internal SATA III hard drive on my motherboard, no partition appears (it appears with no file system when I look at the properties of the drive). Why is that? I have to format it before the partition will appear but of course I will lose all the files already on the drive.

Without formatting, if I reconnect via USB then the partition appears and my files are still there.

The internal drive name shows in Windows as "Hitachi HDS5C4040ALE630".

Formatting it is a problem because I've got lots of full USB 3.0 hard drives that I want to disassemble and use as eSATA SATA III drives. Rather than plugging them in and they work, I would have to copy all the drive contents to other formatted drives which would take ages.

All the drives are just data drives, they do NOT contain the Windows installation on it.

More about : 4tb internal hard drive removed usb casing show windows

a c 328 G Storage
November 12, 2013 12:17:41 PM

Many USB drives have encryption hardware in their circuitry, and when you use it outside the external housing the data will not be accessible.
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November 12, 2013 12:35:34 PM

Hitachi never mentioned that when I spoke to them so I don't think the drive has encryption.
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a c 327 G Storage
November 12, 2013 2:40:32 PM

Hitachi's datasheet states that the product is compatible with Windows XP. Unless Hitachi is providing some special driver (eg Paragon's GPT driver), then this means that the external enclosure must be configured with a 4KB sector size, or similar.

http://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/TouroDesk_...

You could verify this by executing the following command at a Windows CMD prompt:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo X:

... where X is the drive letter.
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a c 78 G Storage
November 12, 2013 2:53:34 PM

Davey Mames said:
I have a 4TB Hitachi Touro DX3 USB 3.0 drive used on Windows 7 64-bit. It's NTFS and it's working fine and I've got files on it. However when I remove the drive from the casing and use it as an internal SATA III hard drive on my motherboard, no partition appears (it appears with no file system when I look at the properties of the drive). Why is that? I have to format it before the partition will appear but of course I will lose all the files already on the drive.

Without formatting, if I reconnect via USB then the partition appears and my files are still there.

The internal drive name shows in Windows as "Hitachi HDS5C4040ALE630".

Formatting it is a problem because I've got lots of full USB 3.0 hard drives that I want to disassemble and use as eSATA SATA III drives. Rather than plugging them in and they work, I would have to copy all the drive contents to other formatted drives which would take ages.

All the drives are just data drives, they do NOT contain the Windows installation on it.


I had the same problem as you have, drive me crazy for days.

After days of investigate the problem - I bought one if this.
Now can can read ANY HDD with data from ANY USB3.0 external drive.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006427OW0

There is something in the USB adapter, that makes straight SATA interfaces wont readable
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November 13, 2013 10:58:07 AM

fzabkar said:
Hitachi's datasheet states that the product is compatible with Windows XP. Unless Hitachi is providing some special driver (eg Paragon's GPT driver), then this means that the external enclosure must be configured with a 4KB sector size, or similar.

http://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/TouroDesk_...

You could verify this by executing the following command at a Windows CMD prompt:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo X:

... where X is the drive letter.


Should I do that when the drive is connected via USB or when it's used as an internal hard drive?
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November 13, 2013 10:59:08 AM

FireWire2 said:

I had the same problem as you have, drive me crazy for days.

After days of investigate the problem - I bought one if this.
Now can can read ANY HDD with data from ANY USB3.0 external drive.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006427OW0

There is something in the USB adapter, that makes straight SATA interfaces wont readable


What does the adapter do exactly?
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a c 78 G Storage
November 13, 2013 4:09:50 PM

This Seagate adapter allows me to read the existing data from HDD taking from > 2TB USB external enclosures.

I think it has an embedded 4K advanced format (4AF) scheme, like other > 2TB USB enclosures. This 4AF lets a 32bit OS like WinXP sees 4TB HDD. So without it, like straight SATA connection, your system wont able to read the existing data, because the reference point of LBA is not the same.

Note: this only applies to HDD greater than 2TB
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a b G Storage
November 13, 2013 4:13:53 PM

Davey Mames said:
FireWire2 said:

I had the same problem as you have, drive me crazy for days.

After days of investigate the problem - I bought one if this.
Now can can read ANY HDD with data from ANY USB3.0 external drive.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006427OW0

There is something in the USB adapter, that makes straight SATA interfaces wont readable


What does the adapter do exactly?


I think you plug a cable into your harddrive and into the adapter into the computer that will make your HDD readable. I'm not completely sure though.
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a c 327 G Storage
November 13, 2013 4:21:10 PM

Run fsutil against the drive when it is inside the enclosure. I suspect that it will report a 4096-byte physical sector size.

As for what the enclosure does, it incorporates a USB-SATA bridge IC. The bridge firmware inside the enclosure communicates with the host's USB controller using 4KB LBAs and a SCSI command set.

The bridge then breaks up each 4KB LBA into eight 512e sectors, and the HDD reassembles them internally as a single 4KB pysical sector.

USB host <-- USB, 4KB, SCSI --> bridge firmware <-- SATA, 512e --> HDD (4KB physical sectors)

As you can see, there are two levels of translation.

Seagate and WD do it this way is to maintain compatibility with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP which are limited to 32-bit LBAs. I presume your Hitachi drive is similarly configured.
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a c 78 G Storage
November 13, 2013 4:24:03 PM

fzabkar said:
Run fsutil against the drive when it is inside the enclosure. I suspect that it will report a 4096-byte physical sector size.

As for what the enclosure does, it incorporates a USB-SATA bridge IC. The bridge firmware inside the enclosure communicates with the host's USB controller using 4KB LBAs and a SCSI command set.

The bridge then breaks up each 4KB LBA into eight 512e sectors, and the HDD reassembles them internally as a single 4KB pysical sector.

USB host <-- USB, 4KB, SCSI --> bridge firmware <-- SATA, 512e --> HDD (4KB physical sectors)

As you can see, there are two levels of translation.

Seagate and WD do it this way is to maintain compatibility with legacy operating systems such as Windows XP which are limited to 32-bit LBAs. I presume your Hitachi drive is similarly configured.


Make sense
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