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I have a WD mybook witha 5TB HDD in it, formatted as a single partition. I removed the drive from its MyBook enclosure and installed it into my desktop computer.

When I open disk management I see 6 partitions. Some unallocated, some are healthy. I cannot access these from file explorer. It has a volume assigned as (E:) but won't work.

The HDD is a WD Blue.

What are the options to make this work as a regular internal hard drive?


Additionally when I plug it other HDD into the external enclosure it won't work either.

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    The enclosure's playing some tricks with the on-disk sector format for Windows XP compatibility. You'll need to repartition and reformat the drive if you want to use it outside the enclosure.
    – bwDraco
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 20:26
  • @bwDraco I'm reading that article thank you.
    – Jay Park
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 20:30

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Unfortunately, @Jay, you shouldn't have taken the HDD out of the enclosure as it voids the warranty on the WD product! :(

The reason why the HDD is not working properly as an internal drive is because it's tied to the enclosure due to the hardware encryption, which will make the data on the drive inaccessible without the original USB-SATA bridge PCB (a.k.a. the WD My Book enclosure) to decrypt them.

Larger external hard drives (above 2 TB) are configured with 4KB LBAs within their enclosure. When you remove the hard drive itself, you expose it to its native 512e LBAs. This means that even if the external drive was not encrypted, you'd still need an enclosure that is configured with the same 4KB sector size as the HDD.

Hope I was helpful.

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  • This is exactly zero helpful. I always test drives with and without the enclosure just to make sure that I'm not in trouble if the enclosure becomes faulty. In the past 12 years or so I have seen many faulty enclosures, also from WD. You make your answer sound as if you are telling a naughty pupil off for doing something the vendor doesn't like. That's why I downvoted this.
    – Oliver
    Commented Jan 17, 2016 at 22:53

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