Moving External HDD to Internal - Drive Needs formatting?!

Aikon359 · 19 Aug 2015 at 22:14

Evenin all!,

having a bit or a mare here really and had quite a dig around to no avail.

I have a 4tb HGST Touro external usb 3.0 drive and decided to finally crack it open (very carefully) and add it as an internal drive.

Once all sorted and installed, i Boot up and the drive shows but wants to be formatted?! (mini heart attack time!). i took it out and re hooked it up to the usb 3.0 interface it was originally using and all was fine. (chock full of data so cant format it).

anyone come across this before? and is there a way i can solve this without having to but another 4tb drive to transfer everything across?... just to reformat it.. :-(

its formatted as ntfs btw.

thanks as always you lurverly people! :-)

Surveyor · 19 Aug 2015 at 22:51

I'm not fully au fait with the technical details but it's something to do with the sectors being remapped by the USB controller when in the enclosure to allow it to work with older operating systems however this mapping is not in place when the disk is mounted internally.

I've no idea if there's a way to solve the problem and keep your data.

Aikon359 · 19 Aug 2015 at 23:03

Hmm , thatd make sense. cheers dude. looks like i might not have any other option than to buy another one.

bledd · 20 Aug 2015 at 01:18

This is why I'm not a fan of purpose bought external drives. I much prefer buying an internal drive and an enclosure for it.

Buy a 4tb internal drive. If you value your data, you should have a backup of it anyway..