Hard drive shows corrupted/no partition table yet it boots normally on PC

Question

I extracted this hard drive from a PC and connected it to my backup server through a SATA-to-USB 2.0 adapter and Windows promptly asked to format the hard drive. I proceeded to disconnect it and connect it to a Linux PC and the result is the same. fdisk shows no partitions whatsoever, as if the partition table were blank or corrupted. The thing is, that if I connect it to the "original" computer where it was, it boots normally and works perfectly fine. Why does this happen? Is there a way to workaround this?

Also: I have to add that this is not exclusive to this drive, I have experienced this behaviour where the drive would only work on the same PC/adaptor where it was "formatted" on, or where the partition table was created:

1. With many Windows 8/8.1 laptops.
2. With some Windows 7 computers.
3. With a SATA 2.5" HDD drive enclosure I got. This one is tricky since I could only use the drive through the enclosure (I formatted the drive through it) and not directly from a SATA port or trough the SATA-to-USB adaptor, likewise, If I formatted the drive through the adaptor, it wouldn't work using the enclosure nor directly to a SATA port and so on...

I hope you can help me, thank you.

Answer 1

I have seen this happen. The 1st possibility is full drive encryption using a hardware TPM chip (Workaround:disable encryption). Second, I think some PC manufacturers are offsetting the hard drives sector 0. So they create a reserved area, for them. The PC it told to start at sector 10 (or whatever) is 0, and you try and boot on a PC that does have this offset and of course it doesn't work.

Honestly, extracting hdd is the hard way. I would suggest a PXE(network boot) solution such as a drbl server. Hit F12, or whatever network boot is, a couple time, make sure it connects and walk away.