Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Your question

3Tb HDD was working....

Tags:
  • Storage
  • Hard Drives
  • Seagate
Last response: in Storage
Share
October 6, 2014 4:56:54 PM

I recently purchased a 3Tb Seagate Barracuda and it's housed in a BlacX docking station. I purchased this because my old "C" drive was acting up and I feared it would soon die. I used the 3Tb to clean off a couple of other HDD's, one of which would be used for my o/s. All went well until I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (the same as I had been using). Now this drive appears as a blank, 3 partitioned drive instead of one large drive. It worked fine before the fresh install - but it isn't being seen now.

I do have another 3Tb Barracuda, that I've been using for over a year - and it still appears as expected (unpartitioned), when inserted into the docking station...

Any suggestions as to how I can get this drive to be recognized - again - would be most appreciated.

More about : 3tb hdd working

a b G Storage
October 6, 2014 5:06:53 PM

Was it formatted with GPT or NTFS/FAT32?
m
0
l
October 6, 2014 5:47:23 PM

You can try reformatting the drive, right clicking the box where it says Disk 0/1/2 etc, then convert to GPT Disk. This will put all the separate un-allocated memory into one partition.
m
0
l
October 7, 2014 9:17:17 PM

I'VE DISCOVERED WHAT HAPPENED....

After installing a fresh copy of Windows 7, onto a newly formatted HDD, I inserted the 3Tb disk into the docking station. Windows immediately opened a window telling me this disk needed to be formatted (it already had over 2Tb of material on it!!). Windows then began "doing something" while I reached for the mouse to push the cancel button.

It appears I wasn't fast enough. Windows did a quick format on the drive and turned it into 3 partitions of 1Tb each.

I don't know why this happened but can only guess it was because the drive had been formatted as a GPT and not as a MBR disk (my two other 3Tb hard drives were formatted as MBR and they work just fine). If my guess is correct, the reason it didn't have this problem with my old installation is because I had already updated it with service pack 1 - but hadn't done it yet with the new install.

I'm posting these speculations in case somebody else runs into a similar situation - in the hope it will prevent them from experiencing similar headaches...

I'm currently working to recover all my lost material - - what Windows 7 did in a few short seconds is going to take me almost 48 hours to correct :o 

Thanks to "ronintexas" and "ShadowsVoid" for your input and help in directing my thoughts...
m
1
l
!