[SOLVED] USB Hard Drive Adapter

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xjdigger

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Dec 10, 2018
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Common problem with USB Hard Drive Adapters where windows asking to format hard drive.
I have an older Bytecc USB 2.0 that works well in backing up my data to Hard drives which is more convenient than blu ray or dvd. been doing this for years. I purchased a new bytecc Drive Mate and get the error "Need to Format the Disk before you Use it". BUT the same hard drives work fine with the older exactly the same looking unit. I also experienced this with a 2 hard drive SATA docking station purchased form Best Buy and had to return it. This seems to be a Windows 10 problem. How do I figure out what is the problem. I need two adapters to sort some information on my hard drive backups.
 
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I suspect that the new docking station is configured with a 4KB sector size rather than the older 512-byte standard. If you examine the drive in Disk Management you will probably find that its primary partition is 8 times larger than it actually is.
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xjdigger

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Dec 10, 2018
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More information: My original Bytecc USB 2.0 Drive Mate is listed in Windows 10 Disk Management as Basic NTFS. I can read, copy and paste files just great.

The new Drive Mate gets the Need to format message and is listed as a RAW File System and cannot access this disk.

I had this same problem with a 2 drive SATA docking station from Best Buy and had no help from the Geek Squad in resolving the problem so I had to return the drive. I recall the problem about a 2 months ago that it initially looked at some of the drives Ok but some were unreadable. Then it would not look at any of the drives and gave the format disk message. When I plugged them into the Bytecc Drive Mate I could read all but one corrupted drive (which I had labeled as corrupted). My drive mate also reads my IDE drives backups.

I have 11 SATA backup internal Hard disks and many IDEs. (Backing up about 30 years of backups). The drives are new drives that I back up into and then store them away. Now my goal is to create a new backup consolidating all my information on one or 2 Hard Drives of pictures books documents Mozilla Scrapbooks and other information.

I believe this is a windows problem and would like to know how I can get to the bottom of this problem. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to research this problem, I have no resolution in months of tinkering with this.
 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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I suspect that the new docking station is configured with a 4KB sector size rather than the older 512-byte standard. If you examine the drive in Disk Management you will probably find that its primary partition is 8 times larger than it actually is.
 
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