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Help! 3TB HDD becomes GPT protective partition if not plugged in SATA port.

P

pwangdel

Member
Greetings:

I have Seagate 3TB, 7200RPM SATA HDD. When installing it in an USB 3.0 external enclosure or SATA to eSATA dock, Windows 10 Pro 64 bit shows the drive in disk management as GPT Protective Partition where every context menu such as conversion, assigned letter etc are grayed out and I am unable to access the data. However, if the drive is plugged directly into an internal SATA port, the disk management shows it as Basic, all the menus become available again and the data is now accessible. The result is the same when try it on other 64 bit machine. What am I missing? Is there a way to fix this without loosing any data?

Note, I have many other Seagate 3TB similar to this one and Windows 10 doesn't have any problem what so ever to recognize and access them either in dock, external enclosure or internal SATA.

Your help to solve this issue is greatly appreciated.
 
Might try swapping out the troublesome hard drive with another SATA drive, and see if the same error occurs.
At least: that would say whether the external enclosure's controller chip is at fault, or not.
Is the PC's USB 3.0 port an Intel port or some other 3rd party controller port?
 
@vailr: thr PC is Dell XPS 8700, the device manager shows it's Intel controller.
I try other 3TB Seagate and have no problem.

@Elixer: thanks for the link.

Thank you all for your suggestion and help.

After unplugging from the internal sata and plug it back into the dock and the external enclosure, Windows 10 recognizes the drive and I am able to access the files. I have no clue what is happening.
 
Some external USB/SATA interfaces do stupid pet tricks in order to recognize certain drives. This sometimes screws up certain sector formats, partition schemes, etc.

If the drive works fine w/ an internal SATA connection, then it's the USB adapter. Get a new one.
 
Advanced format drives with no legacy reporting also seem to do weird things with some bridge chips used in external enclosures.
 
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