Moved my 3TB from a USB connection to a SATA, drive now shows as GPT

[Arkitech]

To make a long story short, my original WD 3TB failed and I was sent a warranty replacement. I connected both the old and new drive to a USB dock while performing data recovery. I had formatted the new drive as NTFS, however this morning when I connected the new drive to the sata cable and powered it up I found there was no drive letter and diskmgmt reports the drive as now being a GPT partition and a large chunk of the drive space as unallocated.

2 questions.

Does anyone know why this may have happened?
What can I do to convert the drive back to original state without data loss?

Thank you guys for any help. I literally took me hours to recover all my data and I'm really hoping I don't have to repeat that process again.

 

[Nashemon]

I believe you're confusing the technologies. GPT refers to how the partition table is layed out, not how the drive is formatted. The other option would be MBR (master boot record), but drives over 2TB require GPT, so it was probably always GPT.

NTFS is how your drive is formatted, which probably hasn't changed.

Is your replacement drive the same size as the old one? Did you clone them? Are you actually missing data, or just space? You can likely use DISKPART to extend the partition in either case.

 

[Arkitech]

I believe you're confusing the technologies. GPT refers to how the partition table is layed out, not how the drive is formatted. The other option would be MBR (master boot record), but drives over 2TB require GPT, so it was probably always GPT.

NTFS is how your drive is formatted, which probably hasn't changed.

Is your replacement drive the same size as the old one? Did you clone them? Are you actually missing data, or just space? You can likely use DISKPART to extend the partition in either case.

The replacement is the same as the old one, but I did not clone the disk. What's missing is the data and the space is allocated incorrectly.

Initially the drive was assigned a drive letter and all hard drive space was allocated to the one partition. So I'm really confused why it changed, but more importantly I'm hoping I can change the drive back to it's prior state without losing data. Do you know of any Windows commands that might correct this issue?

 

[Arkitech]

https://imgur.com/a/GpuTw

Here's a screenshot

 

[ch33zw1z]

kill both partitions on the new drive and create one big one

the one in red is the failing disk, so meh....you get what you get.

also, data recovery after a drive failure is poor planning. back it up before you incur a failure.

 

[Arkitech]

Will creating a new partition on the new drive permanently wipe out the data?

 

[corkyg]

Usually, yes.

 

[Arkitech]

Usually, yes.

Anyway to save the data that you're aware of?

 

[deustroop]

Using a 32 bit OS is the source of the problem. See the partition tool called EaseUS. Apparently you will be able to re-partition without losing data. See the article named

How to Solve GPT Protective Partition Error

 

[VirtualLarry]

https://imgur.com/a/GpuTw

Here's a screenshot

Hate to tell you, but that drive in the red circle? It's not detecting properly, and may be hosed altogether. It's not responding correctly to a "Drive Identify Command".

Does your USB dock, 1) Support drives of that size, and 2) does it have an on/off switch, that you can safely switch "off", when done cloning, and allow the drive to safely spin down, before removing it from the dock? If you just "yank" the drive from the dock, the disk may be damaged if it was still spinning.

 

[Elixer]

OP, which USB enclosure is this?
If you hook it back up to the USB enclosure, can it still read it OK?

The drive could still be salvageable, but need more info.