Why does HDD show up as two HDDs?

[eRacer]

Bought a used 2TB Hitachi drive and noticed that it shows up as two drives. One drive is shown as a RAW partition. It can't be formatted and according to the properties has a capacity of 0 bytes. The other can be initialized and formatted fine. I can't make the RAW drive disappear. If I try to format it or use "clean all" in diskpart I get a "The device is not ready" message. Is there a way to format this drive so it will be recognized as one drive?

 

[UsandThem]

Where it says disk 4, right click on that and select initialize. It will prompt you to select mbr or gpt format, and after that you combine the two partitions to make one drive.

 

[Ketchup]

Since its a used drive, remove the partition(s) first. I might also recommend a program that might make the process a little easier.
http://filehippo.com/download_easeus_partition_master_home/

 

[eRacer]

EASEUS Partition Master didn't make a difference because Windows 10 Pro Disk Management still detects the drive as being two drives. Starting with no partitions, EASEUS Partition Master can create a usable partition like Disk Management, but it doesn't show the second instance of the same drive. However, after using Partition Master, when I go back into Windows 10 Pro Disk Management it detects the same drive twice (Disk 3 and Disk 4) and always asks to initialize Disk 3. But if I try to initialize Disk 3 then Disk Management gives a "This device is not ready" error.

 

[UsandThem]

Try doing it manually with the command prompt:

http://www.winability.com/delete-protected-efi-disk-partition/

Go half way down and start where it shows running the command prompt in admin mode, and try doing it with diskpart.

Also, you have this drive connecting to a SATA port in your computer, right? If it is an external enclosure or connected with a USB adapter cable, that will cause issues for what you need to do.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

It looks like your computer is detecting it twice... how is this hooked up?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Could it be auto-mounting a .VDI on the drive? Somethings really wierd, if it's detecting as TWO drives.

 

[master_shake_]

what if you run diskpart?

list disk

select disk "x" x being number of drive no quotations

clean.

 

[eRacer]

Try doing it manually with the command prompt:

http://www.winability.com/delete-protected-efi-disk-partition/

Go half way down and start where it shows running the command prompt in admin mode, and try doing it with diskpart.

Also, you have this drive connecting to a SATA port in your computer, right? If it is an external enclosure or connected with a USB adapter cable, that will cause issues for what you need to do.

what if you run diskpart?

list disk

select disk "x" x being number of drive no quotations

clean.

This drive is just connected over a standard SATA cable. Tried diskpart > clean all and it just gives a "device not ready" message on the RAW/0 byte drive. On the other drive it will finish successfully, but it doesn't get me any closer to having the drive being recognized as one drive instead of two.

Could it be auto-mounting a .VDI on the drive? Somethings really wierd, if it's detecting as TWO drives.

This drive was supposedly used in a data center. If this is some sort of virtual drive partitioning, exactly what steps would I have to take to undo that?

 

[master_shake_]

secure erase in parted magic or maybe even the partition editor?

 

[Ketchup]

If you wipe the partition, does Disk Management? What motherboard is this? In the grand scheme of things, I don't see this hurting anything, but I would love it is we could figure out what's causing it.

 

[Smoblikat]

Backup your data, unplug all other drives, and run a DBAN on it. If that doesnt fix it then its not a problem with the drive, most likely a windows issue.

http://www.dban.org/

 

[addverma]

Were you able to figure out and solve the double disk issue?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Very, very, strange. Are there SATA disk firmware versions that appear as a SATA port multiplier to the controller?

 

[mv2devnull]

Backup your data, unplug all other drives, and run a DBAN on it. If that doesnt fix it then its not a problem with the drive, most likely a windows issue.

+1

A used drive that may have nontypical metadata lingering on it. Something that Windows falsely identifies as something. The obvious solution is to not look at the drive via Windows. DBAN or live Linux distro looks at the drive differently.