How to Fix Unallocated HDD

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Isaiah Doming

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Dec 23, 2014
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I have a 3TB HDD in my newly built PC. I have also a 240GB SSD by intel in it also. HOWEVER. MY HDD does not show up when I click the "computer" icon to see all my Storage and when I was in device manager area My HDD was "Unallocated" How do I fix this and how do I save things to this Harddrive.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Disk Management
Right click on that drive
What options does it give you?
 
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Isaiah Doming

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Dec 23, 2014
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If I right click where it says Disk one I get these as my following options;
New spanned volume... (Unable to be click)
New striped volume... (Unable to be click)
New mirrored volume... (Unable to be click)
New RAID - 5 volume... (Unable to be click)
Convert to Dynamic disk...
Convert to MBR disk...
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Properties
Help

- When I right click where it says Unallocated I get these as my options ; -
New Simple Volume...
New spanned volume... (Unable to be click)
New striped volume... (Unable to be click)
New mirrored volume... (Unable to be click)
New RAID - 5 volume... (Unable to be click)
Properties
Help

Anything with "Unable to be click" is highlighted in grey and you cant click it.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Give it D, or E, or Q, or whatever. Just not C.

For Steam games, in the Steam client, you can designate other locations for installs.
Steam
Settings
Downloads
Steam Library Folders
Add Library Folder
 
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olivaman30

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Feb 27, 2015
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I am having a similar problem. I have a Western Digital 2TB hard drive which used to be an external HDD. My wife moved the hard drive and appeared to have a damaged a pin on the controller card for the USB cable on the enclosure so my hard drive was not being accessed. I removed the HDD and plugged it into a SATA port. I'm running Windows 8.1 and the HDD only shows up in Disk Management as "Unallocated". If I do "New Simple Volume" will that destroy the data that is on the disk. I have about 8 years of video and photos on the drive and do not want to lose it. Any help would be appreciated.
 
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ArtPog

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Sep 17, 2014
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Well, as this of this moment all the data that resided on that disk has gone. The only recourse you have now to retrieve the lost data is to try one of the many data recovery programs available on the net. Hopefully you'll be lucky but understand it's a crapshoot at best. You may want to try this Recuva program see...http://www.piriform.com/recuva
which seems to get good reviews. And you could do a Google search for data recovery programs and try this one or that one. Probably other posters will provide suggestions as well.

Then you could engage a commercial data recovery service but understand that's an expensive process with no guarantee of success.
 
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olivaman30

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Feb 27, 2015
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I've solved my problem. As for my data, I have it all back. The USB 3.0 port on the back of the WD Mybook Essential Enclosure had a damaged pin which caused the initial read failure. When I removed the HDD from the enclosure and placed it in the drive, the data was read as unallocated because the HDD's original data had been "encrypted" by the PCB Control Board. I ordered a replacement board for $40 and put the drive back in the enclosure and sure enough, all my data was there. Just wanted to share my experience.
 
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ArtPog

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Excellent. It's the first time I've ever come across this kind of situation where data had been encrypted (without user intervention) on a USBEHD because of a damaged connecting pin. Could you briefly describe how you diagnosed the problem?
 
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olivaman30

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Feb 27, 2015
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I was notified by a local technician who stated that Western Digital external hard drives automatically encrypt through the PCB. I was also advised that the PCB version numbers should match as hard drive firmware is paired with the revision of each board. In my case: 4061-705094-001 Rev AA was the label on my barcode sticker and 4060-705094-001 REV A on the PCB itself. I was able to find a matching board and changed it out and everything was back to normal. My technician also told me I could have just removed the old micro B USB 3.0 port and resoldered a new one on since the broken pin was just the cause of the disk not being able to be read.
On a side note: Once I extracted all my info and backed it up onto another hard drive, I took the drive out of the enclosure and plugged it into SATA port, initialized, formatted and wiped it and placed it into a generic enclosure so I will no longer have to worry about USB/PCB failures and data encryption.
 
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ArtPog

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Sep 17, 2014
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Thanks. Good to know.

 
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absoluteorder86

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Oct 31, 2017
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I Have the same problem, on my 'My Passport Ultra 1TB" the problem is the "New simple volume" is unable to choose. And when i right click on the "Disk 1" its said i havent initialized yet , when i try to initialized it said "the device is not ready"
how do i solve it then ?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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1. Restart your system and try again.

2. Create a new thread for your issue.
You and I are probably the only ones who will see this.
 
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