External HDD - for use as internal HDD

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Thwwack

Honorable
Mar 28, 2014
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10,510
Hi there, I'm hoping you folks can help me, because this one has me beat...

I bought a 3tb Western Digital Elements 'Desktop' Hard Drive today, took it out of its enclosure, and put the 3.5" drive (sata) into my desktop computer, hoping to use it as an internal hard drive.

The thing doesn't seem to want to work. Can you not put an external hard drive into a computer case like a regular internal hard drive?

I'm running windows 8 64bit, with a fresh install.
Maximus vi Hero Motherboard

P.S. It works when running from the enclosure.
 
Solution
STACKS ON DECK
it is indeed a regular hard drive but without the case in which it is . you can take HDD out from the element case hen you can put this 2.5" drive into your enclosure
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T

Thwwack

Honorable
Mar 28, 2014
17
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10,510
Thanks for your response. The 3.5" Hard drive is in my machine right now, and it shows up as D: in the 'computer' screen. The thing is, when I right click+properties on the thing, it shows as 0bytes used space, and 0bytes free space.
 
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T

Thwwack

Honorable
Mar 28, 2014
17
0
10,510
I got it working. For anyone looking for a solution to this problem: http://newmeridian.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/external-3tb-hard-drive-size-not-detected-formatting-shows-only-349gb/
 
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fzabkar

Judicious
Sep 22, 2010
9,290
697
36,390
The explanation on that "solution" page is wrong. The reason that your 3TB drive shows up as 349GB is that the external enclosure is configured with a 4096-byte sector size. This is to circumvent the 32-bit LBA limit for MBR partitions that would be present if the sector size were 512 bytes. When you remove such a drive from its enclosure, you expose its native 512e sectoring. This reduces the size of the existing 3TB MBR partition by a factor of 8.

(3E12 / 8) bytes = 349.25 gigabytes
 
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