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Reading data from external drive.

B

benwood

Member
I have a 3 TB 3.5 inch Toshiba Canvio external hard drive which I've formatted as a GPT disk in order to use the full 3 TB. I've found that with Seagate 3 TB and 4 TB external hard drives even if you use GPT if you remove the hard drive from the external case and try to use as a regular drive Windows 7 sees it as unformatted so the data stored on it can't be accessed. I believe this caused by some trickery in the SATA/USB conversion board so that Windows XP can use these > 2 TB drives.

I've had external hard drives fail before because of a bad power supply, bad SATA/USB converter board but when I pulled it out of the external case the bare drive was seem by Windows 7 fine with the data stored on it intact. Is there a software program that can read the data on the bare drive even though Windows sees it as unformatted?
 
QuietDad said:
GPT is supported native IF your computer support UEFI.
Click to expand...

That is only a requirement for booting from GPT.

OP, are you on WinXP? Or 7? Makes a difference on what software to recommend. Your enclosure was probably doing some funky 4k sector conversion.

Would be easier to pull the data off and reformat if your target is Win7.
 
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benwood said:
Is there a software program that can read the data on the bare drive even though Windows sees it as unformatted?
Click to expand...
Pretty much any software can do that. The problem is that the bare drive's data more or less looks like this:
irybfqv826ytgq89292380 57tygo87wfgoaw7v5 JN 434iyft1c8e6tq3...
The partition table, and file system, are what make your OS of choice know to treat, "57tygo87", say, as a little-endian 64-bit signed integer (or whatever it's actually looking for at that point). So, having direct access to the drive's data is not much help, without software that make sense of it.

If you can use all 3 TB with it partitioned as MBR, you will have the same issue as you've read about with others, especially Seagates. If MBR limits you to 2TB, you aught to be OK. The trickery is that modern drives have native 4K sectors, but for MBR, emulated 512B sectors are used. But, these externals will take advantage of USB MSC using 4K sectors, and the USB bridge itself makes it work like a 4K HDD, even when used as MBR (for XP's sake).
 
All of my computers except one are running Windows 7 Home Premium x64 SP1. .I have one computer still running Windows XP SP3 and I don't care about using > 2 TB drives with it.
 
benwood said:
All of my computers except one are running Windows 7 Home Premium x64 SP1. .I have one computer still running Windows XP SP3 and I don't care about using > 2 TB drives with it.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but does Toshiba care?
 
Are you comfortable booting your computer into a Linux live CD? If so, you should boot up the gparted live CD (or really any other distro with gparted) and see if it can make anything of the partition table.
 
Don't know anything about Linux but as long as its usable without Linux knowledge I'd be willing to give it a try. Right now I'm hoping I won't need it but it will be nice to know I can retrieve the data if I need to.
 
GParted has a very nice, straightforward GUI, so I think you shouldn't find yourself too far out of your metaphorical depth.

All you need to do is burn (BURN, not copy!) the iso to a blank CD, and then boot from the optical drive.
 
And this is why I didn't buy a Toshiba USB drive after I heard they do some BS overlay in the USB to SATA bridge...
 
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