External Hard Disk is showing as unallocated and unreadable when connected internally

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ChaoticWolf

ChaoticWolf

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Feb 2, 2016
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My external hdd's usb port came off of it's sata to usb adapter board thingy, and I need to get that back on the board somehow sometime soon, but in the meantime, I thought I would connect the drive internally with a sata cable into my computer, but for whatever reason, the drive is appearing as unallocated in disk management, it's being detected by the computer but I can't access it

I heard that some external hard drive's can't be connected internally because of encryption on something, and you can't see the files so the drive just comes up that way
Is there any way I can access the files instead of just waiting to get the usb port put back on?
 
Solution
BFG-9000
May not be encryption, but simply the housing being designed to do sector modification techniques so >2.2TB drives could be used with XP. When connected internally, large drives require long LBA addressing, which for Vista and up means GPT partitions but for XP could mean the dreaded drive overlay software (which would cause the same problem you see if moved to a different computer). The external housing lies to the OS about the drive parameters, translating it into something XP can understand. That's why some 4TB external disks can work fine in XP, and moving those to internal use may require a reformat.

So it could simply be a case of WDC at the time also using such housings for smaller drives so they wouldn't need to make...
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R_1

R_1

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Sep 8, 2015
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if the external controller encrypted the drive only it can decrypt it. the decryption key is hard-wired or otherwise stored on the controller.
you would need the controller to work one more time, copy everything off of the drive, then you can format it inside of the computer and restore the data.
what model external drive?
 
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ChaoticWolf

ChaoticWolf

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Feb 2, 2016
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I don't know the exact model of the drive, but I know it's a Western Digital My Passport 1TB backup drive, it's an older version and not the newest ones that can have multiple colors to choose from, and it uses ac power to get power to it
I did get this drive used for $50 in great condition and when I hooked it up for the first time, it came up as "My Passport", it might be a My Book but I'm not so sure, maybe the person that owned it got it wrong or something like that
It looks something like this: https://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61cOP7DHq6L._SL1500_.jpg or https://www.amazon.com/WD-External-Drive-Storage-Backup/dp/B008S94HXG?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0&portal-device-attributes=desktop (this is not the exact drive its 1tb of course but it looks very identical to it)
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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Sep 17, 2016
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May not be encryption, but simply the housing being designed to do sector modification techniques so >2.2TB drives could be used with XP. When connected internally, large drives require long LBA addressing, which for Vista and up means GPT partitions but for XP could mean the dreaded drive overlay software (which would cause the same problem you see if moved to a different computer). The external housing lies to the OS about the drive parameters, translating it into something XP can understand. That's why some 4TB external disks can work fine in XP, and moving those to internal use may require a reformat.

So it could simply be a case of WDC at the time also using such housings for smaller drives so they wouldn't need to make multiple kinds. Today's external drives no longer do this, formatting them GPT. However this doesn't mean they are movable to internal either--their current drives dispense with the housing's circuit board adapter entirely so are USB-only:
KcTsmJf.jpg
 
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