my desktop (windows 8 pro) currently has a single hard drive in it that uses MBR and is broken up into OS and DATA partitions

i added a second disk, a 4TB drive that was originally in a USB 3.0 enclosure...i formatted it NTFS using GPT, with 3 partitions: one 2TB, and two 1TB...they show up just fine using the enclosure and connected via the USB cable

when i put it into the computer as a "regular" hard drive via SATA, i can't use it (see picture below)...thoughts? i CAN wipe it out and start over from scratch with it in the computer already and move the data back onto it, but i'm hesitant to do it for two reasons:

1.) 4TB is a lot to transfer (again)
2.) i don't even have the option of initializing the drive, assigning the letter, or reformatting...so i'm not sure where to begin

thoughts?



EDIT: well, fuckballs, i just realized it says "GPT Protective Partition" and i think that might be the issue (though i don't know what it means)...i spent 30 minutes trying to figure out what was going on, but i'm betting that has something to do with it...i'll google and see what happens

[Edited on August 20, 2013 at 9:02 PM. Reason : protective partition?]

8/20/2013 8:59:15 PM

I've yet to ever be able to take a drive from a usb3.0 enclosure and hot-plug it into a system as an internal drive or vice versa. I've got 3-4 different external usb drives (different manufacturers) and they all have "custom" firmware on their controllers that makes the formatted drive in the enclosure incompatible with windows as a bare drive.

Never looked into why, but I'm guessing each manufacturer has their own encryption layer between the bare drive and the USB3 device. It's really annoying, but if you find a way around it, let me know.

8/20/2013 10:25:11 PM

yeah, no solution that would preserve that data that i was able to find...had to run diskpart and "clean" the drive before i could initialize it and break it back into the partitions

once i get everything back onto it, i'm going to use one of my old drives with the USB 3.0 enclosure and run some tests, see if i can plug a drive with data into and have it work, and then whether it makes a difference if it's MBR or GPT...because otherwise i might screw myself over one day trying to use it with a drive i don't want messed up

8/21/2013 9:14:09 AM

Hasn't worked for me the other way either. Plugging an old drive into the controller will also show up as a blank drive that needs to be formatted. Again ymmv there, but I was pretty pissed. This is with Iomega, Seagate and WD usb3.0 enclosures

8/21/2013 2:27:20 PM