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HDD works in dock, but not in ext. enclosure..?

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  • Storage
  • Hard Drives
  • Enclosure
Last response: in Storage
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October 12, 2014 6:36:38 PM

Hey guys,

Hopefully someone will be able to chime in with a bit of expertise. I recently moved to the US for a semester exchange from Holland, and I brought with me a 2TB HDD with data on it. I used this HDD with a usb 3.0 docking station back home with my primary desktop, but I didn't want to bring all that with me.

Instead I just bought a usb 2.0 external enclosure here and plunked my HDD in it. However, the drive isn't appearing in My Comp. It does show up in disk management, but as 5 partitions (Healthy (primary) 2x 256gb, 1x 875gb RAW, and 867gb unallocated) to name a few.

I have run testdisk and minitools recovery on the drive and both programs find and can read the files, but I don't have another 2tb hdd to copy everything out onto. I have backups of all the data back home so I'm not worried about that, but I do need access to the drive so I can save new pictures and videos while im here.

Ideally there would be a way to rebuild the partition info while still keeping all the files on there. Is this possible somehow? I don't want to "pointlessly" buy another 2tb drive just to recover data that I have back home, but it would be nice to not have to re-format the whole drive..

Thanks, Bara

More about : hdd works dock ext enclosure

a b G Storage
October 12, 2014 6:43:44 PM

Was the drive partitioned and formatted on the USB 3.0 docking station? Is it possible to use a similar model docking station while you are traveling here?

The docking station may have communicated with the drive differently from what your USB 2.0 drive is using....

The other possible issue may be that the proper drivers are not installed for utilization on that computer. Have you tried it on another computer?
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October 12, 2014 6:51:01 PM

The drive was actually formatted inside the machine through sata. I have quite a few drives that I swap around hence the use of the docking station.

Drivers shouldn't be a problem. At least the new external enclosure claims that it is "driverless" i.e. uses built in windows drivers. I imagine the problem is indeed a different communication method as you stated..

I may end up getting another dock here as well, but I would rather keep that as a last resort option
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a b G Storage
October 12, 2014 6:56:27 PM

I have witnessed many strange problems....with USB devices, the first step I always do is to try it on another computer to see if something isn't creating a problem on that computer - whether it be drivers or software that may interfere (I had a Galaxy Nexus S, and when the drivers were loaded on my computer, I couldn't connect any external usb drives - flash drives or hard drives).
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October 12, 2014 7:27:59 PM

I'll plug in to a mate's laptop tomorrow to test it out as well (y)
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a c 327 G Storage
October 13, 2014 4:58:10 PM

Could you show us the contents of sector 0? That's where the partitions live.

You could use a disc editor such as DMDE (freeware). Select Mode -> Hexadecimal.

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