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I just recently purchased a a 4TB Backup Plus and installed about 1.5GB worth of data. I connected it using the USB 3.0 input on my motherboard. Works fine.

I then decided to use the bare drive itself, internally. So I took apart the external and opened it up. I removed the HDD and installed it in my tower. When I powered on the PC (Windows 8.1 Pro), and tried to open the drive, it gave me the:

This drive must be formatted, blah, blah, blah…

Then:

…the volume does not contain a recognized file system, blah, blah…

I’ve unplugged it from the tower (Desktop) and used the bottom adapter which housed the external drive and connected it using the USB 3.0 again and it works fine. It just won’t work internally using the SATA III ports.

The drive model is ST4000dm000-1f2168 and my file system is NTFS. When I first plugged it in using the USB 3.0, I did a full format.

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  • What filesystem is the drive using?
    – cutrightjm
    Commented Jan 7, 2014 at 6:48
  • newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338, this is the drive but it's housed in an external box.....newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178111
    – user287414
    Commented Jan 7, 2014 at 14:10
  • Yes, i have plenty of power. Corsair AX860
    – user287414
    Commented Jan 7, 2014 at 14:11
  • I'm having the same exact problem with a 3 TB Seagate Backup Plus Desktop drive. Inside the USB enclosure it works, but when connected directly using SATA it's unreadable. Moreover, using DISKMGMT.MSC the hard drive appears as having 3 partitions (349,31 GB of "RAW" data and two unassigned partitions of 1698,68 GB and 746,52 GB). This information is completely WRONG, since the drive in the USB enclosure works as a single NTFS partition (2794,52 GB). How come it's shown like that when connected through SATA?! Sadly, it seems no one knows the solution, since the OP wrote his question 2 years ago
    – OMA
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 0:07
  • 1
    I think here is the answer superuser.com/a/866404/270195
    – clhy
    Commented Dec 17, 2015 at 18:38

1 Answer 1

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It's not saying that the partition isn't recognized. It's saying you have to initialize the drive. This is because the WD bridge that the drive plugs into uses some of the space on the drive for it's firmware. The hardware then sets the first part of the drive a little ahead of the start. It's like raid cards that handle their own table layouts. You could copy the data off the drive by using HxD to find where the partition table starts and then using something like DD to start reading the data into a file from that point onwards, but that's kind of a waist of time. It might also be possible to have DD offset when it's inside the computer. I wouldn't suggest it if you don't have a backup. DD is known as Disk Destroyer for a good reason.

Remember, this is setting the beginning of the drive, not the first partition. So swapping the drive either way will cause trouble.

If you want to use the drive as both an internal and external drive you'll need to purchase an after market USB 3.0/eSata bridge and put the drive in that instead. You'll still have to copy the data off the drive first.

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  • What about this: superuser.com/a/985330/100853 ? Is there a way to find out if the reason for trouble is what you're stating or what is linked to in this comment?
    – Daniel F
    Commented Dec 17, 2015 at 19:52
  • TestDisk partition recovery if you're using Linux.That will show any partitions, though it's been years since I used a non-after market enclosure. Each one does it's own thing and assumes the user will never remove it from it's enclosure.Drives bigger than 2TB have to be formatted as GPT, but Windows 8.1 comes with GPT support out of the box so this wouldn't be an issue unless the enclosure is doing something wonky with the drive layout. It's possible the enclosure is running a proprietary partitioning scheme. If you want to know, look at the header in anything that can get direct drive access
    – Kayot
    Commented Dec 17, 2015 at 20:12