Need help with new 3tb drive

G

gplracer

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 27, 2003
Messages
263
I bought a 3tb western digital drive. It will not show up in windows. I took it to my cousin's house to get some family photos and files. There he plugged it in with a usb adapter and it worked fine. It showed all three tbs. Here at home on both of my computers it will not show up as a drive under my computer. I have attached a picture of its status under computer management.
http://i595.photobucket.com/albums/tt38/gplracer/3tb problem_zpssxfnz1dp.jpg

I plugged the drive into another computer with Windows 10 64 bit and got the same result.
 
Last edited:
Sorry the link should work now. It does show up in computer management. At my cousin's house it worked fine on usb. I just do not have a usb adapter here and he lives 10 hours away.
 
I assume when connected to the USB adapter you had a single 3TB GPT partition.
 
Some USB enclosures report to the OS 4K physical / 4K logical sectors even though the drive reports 512 byte logical sectors to reduce the number of sectors making GPT unneeded. Although your output does not appear to be what I would expect for that.

In either case I believe you will need the USB adapter to read the drive then copy the data to a different drive and then repartition the drive and reformat it connected to the SATA ports on the motherboard.
 
I got this all sorted out. I downloaded a free program called Testdisk. It enabled me to use a command prompt to get the files off the drive. Then I used diskpart at a command prompt and the clean command to reset the partition table on the new 3tb drive. Then I was able to assign a drive letter and start using the drive.
 
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