I took my external Seagate HDDs and put them in my PC. Now my PC detects them and their space but asks that I reformat them.

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KloeS

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Hello. I hope someone can help me. I had three large capacity external HDDs and I decided it would be better for me to have them inside my PC. From what I understood it was a simple matter of taking them out of their enclosures and putting them in my case and connecting them to my SATA ports. My computer is detecting them, but says the space is unallocated and the drives need to be reformatted. I have years worth of data on those drives... I very much would like to get this resolved without losing the data. Or at least be able to recover the data from them before reformatting (though that doesn't sound likely). Thanks in advance for any help you can give. I'm going to try to restart my computer to see if a reboot will change things. Fingers crossed.
 
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Someone Somewhere

Someone Somewhere

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Sep 23, 2012
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Many external HDDs, especially from large manufacturers like WD or Seagate, have encryption or hidden partitions on them.

These usually can't be read (at least not without a lot of difficulty) inside a normal PC.

Put them back in the enclosure, get the data off, then put them in the PC and format them.

And make sure you have a current backup in future. Drives can fail at any time without warning.
 
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K

KloeS

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Thanks for the speedy reply. Someone on another thread suggested attempting to recover the data using "R-Studio". I'm trying that now.
I am not ready to give up on my data yet, but in the future I will be certain to be more careful. The enclosures have been discarded as of a few weeks ago. Otherwise I would happily attempt to reenclose them.
 
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Someone Somewhere

Someone Somewhere

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The enclosures have been discarded as of a few weeks ago. Otherwise I would happily attempt to reenclose them.
Click to expand...
That makes it a bit harder.

Data recovery tools might do it - I'm not sure; haven't tried. Won't work if encrypted, but if they've done something like shift the start of the drive by a few hundred MB it might.

You might also be able to try getting a new drive of the same model and putting that in there.
 
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KloeS

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Using R-Studio I've managed to detect some of the files on one of my drives so far. I can't remember how much was on this drive so I say "some". It may in fact have detected all of them. I am recovering the data onto my "Game" drive as it is currently empty and will then reformat and return the data to the proper drive. I hope this works, and that I can do the same for the rest. I do not believe this is the only or best solution though, so please chime in with answers. Thanks :)
 
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KloeS

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Jul 30, 2014
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That makes it a bit harder.

Data recovery tools might do it - I'm not sure; haven't tried. Won't work if encrypted, but if they've done something like shift the start of the drive by a few hundred MB it might.

You might also be able to try getting a new drive of the same model and putting that in there.[/quotemsg]

Yeah... without the enclosures putting them back might be an issue. Buying new Seagate drives with enclosures might work... but also cost me money
I'm still seeing if the recovery will work, but worst comes to worst I suppose I'll try buying another external drive to use the enclosure *sigh*
 
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KloeS

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It did detect quite a few files... as I said though, not sure how many were there to begin with. However, I doubt it was encrypted. So... we'll see. Thanks for the help again.
 
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KloeS

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The discs are not encrypted so that's good. I bought a external seagate drive and swapped out the ex-external drives from my case with it and tried to use them as externals again. No luck. The PC simply asked me to reformat them before use. So I ran the recovery on one (as an external) and identified the files, but only recovered a handful (it was more successful when I ran it through a SATA connection). I think my best bet is to put the drive back in my case and run the recovery software, recover the data, reformat the drive, and return the data to it. Unless you can offer me a better option?

Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it :)
 
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