Multiple 4TB Sata drives moved from USB enclosure all have RAW & Unpartitioned space

[silverdtvw]

Curious one this - hopefully someone can assist.

I recently picked up 3x Hitachi Touro Pro 4TB USB drives. I hooked up 2 via USB to a Win7 SP1 x64 system - they come ready-to-use pre-formatted in NTFS with a single partition (with some free Hitachi backup software on it).

I copied 2-3 TB's data to each drive, all tested and working.

I then removed the drives from their enclosures (they are SATA 7k4000 Advanceformat (512e) drives inside the enclosure, with a USB-SATA bridge) and connected them to Z68 based motherboard (via onboard SataII ports). Setup as ACHI in bios with Intel drivers in Win7.

All 3 drives - included one that has never been connected via USB - all show up incorrectly. Disk Manager shows them as split into 3 partitions, 1st one is Primary/Active/RAW (with a drive letter assigned), next 2 partitions are Unallocated space. 1st partition is ~1TB, then 1.5TB for the two Unallocated Spaces.

The RAW partition is unreadable to Windows - which obviously wants to format the RAW partition, which I've not done. No request to initialise.


Some googling suggests I'm not the first to encounter the RAW partition issue after removing a drive from USB enclosure - some reports on large Seagate and WD drives, although every assumes it's become corrupt and needs recovery software to fix.

This is clearly not the case here - I'm assuming that either:

1) Win7/Intel drivers are not liking the 4TB partition information - although it's shown as 4TB drive in Diskmanager.
2) Hitachi set the drives up like this, the USB enclosure chip is performing some form of emulation beyond the official 512e standard (very unlikely) to present a NTFS 4TB partition
3) USB drives need less in the way of MBR/GPT info, and the drives are missing some key info here.


Any suggestions about what is happening here, how it can be corrected? Yes, I could delete and reformat - but there should be no need here...

 

[BFG10K]

More than likely the enclosures are employing some kind of emulation to allow full access on systems that don’t support large drives. That means the drives themselves aren’t natively formatted with the assumption that the target system would be able to support them without the emulation.

You can test this by putting them back into the enclosure and seeing if they start working again.

 

[silverdtvw]

More than likely the enclosures are employing some kind of emulation to allow full access on systems that don’t support large drives. That means the drives themselves aren’t natively formatted with the assumption that the target system would be able to support them without the emulation.

You can test this by putting them back into the enclosure and seeing if they start working again.

Yes I suspect that's the case. Will confirm, although I'm confident they will work back in the enclosures.

Suspect it's reformat and recopy 5TB over USB2 time....

 

[Mfusick]

That's gonna take a while

 

[silverdtvw]

That's gonna take a while

Yeah - something like 50+ hours, probably s lot more given a number of smaller files.

If there is proprietry emulation in the external box, it also means I can't reuse them on other drives as I had planned - though I'll test it out.


I'm surprised - they have essentially created a new filesystem; any files larger than 1TB would have to be spanned across partitions which strikes me as unnecessary. Leaves me a bit suspicious...

 

[jjmIII]

Yes, I could delete and reformat - but there should be no need here...

Hmm. Bit surprised you didn't do that from the start.

I'd break the partitions, reformat, and load back up with data.
As flakey as large drives are these days, 50 hours of reloading is just a good test.

I'm really wanting a good deal on a 4TB!

 

[silverdtvw]

Hmm. Bit surprised you didn't do that from the start.

I'd break the partitions, reformat, and load back up with data.
As flakey as large drives are these days, 50 hours of reloading is just a good test.

I'm really wanting a good deal on a 4TB!

Not bought a consumer usb drive for something like 5+ years - was surprised to see a 4GB NTFS partition good to go. And thought pulling in several TB's of data via USB was good way to soak test - just would prefer not to do again..