Windows 7: Oh boy. Please tell me I can save this drive. USB to SATA nightmare.

Ok, so I bought a WD My Book Essential 3TB, and copied about 1TB of information over it. Then I took that 1TB drive and used it in a Tivo hard drive upgrade, so that data is gone.

Now I took the 3TB hard drive out and plugged it into my server as a standard SATA drive.

Windows 7 did not recognize it. It asked do you want to initialize. I said yes as a MBR. I read that it wouldn't cause an issue with erasing data, I hope this is true. At this point I did not do anything further as there was when nothing was showing in Windows Explorer. I did see that there was something that I could allocate as a Simple Volume or something like that.

Freaking out, I took it out and put it back in the USB enclosure and of course, it doesn't work there either, and Disk Manager shows all the space on it as unallocated.

Is there a way to get me out of this mess to save the data on this drive? Please tell me there is a way.

Thanks for your help.

You may be able to recover your original partition structure and files using Partition Wizard. Free download Magic Partition Manager Software, partition magic alternative, free partition magic, partition magic Windows 7 and server partition software - Partition Wizard Online. There is a video on how to use it. How to activate Partition Recovery Wizard of partition magic? Partition Wizard Partition Recovery Wizard Video Help.

Thank you so much. I was able to use this tool to restore back to USB use.

How do I get this disk into a usable SATA state so that I can use it as an internal drive?

Glad to hear that noone. I don't know the answer to that, perhaps someone else will know.

I have asked if someone else can help.

Yeah, the 3TB disk is now plugged in inside my server, but of course i'm back to the same place I was previously whereas Windows 7 is only seeing this disk as an unallocated 2TB disk, even though it is recognized by the system as a 3TB NTFS primary partition when it is used inside the usb enclosure.

I am currently scanning this "2TB" disk using the MiniTool Partition Manager software, but it looks like this is going to take some time. I'm not sure if I can use this particular tool to force my machine to recognize this as a 3TB NTFS drive with data on it already.

There has to be an easier way.

Thanks for any input.

noone,
Investigate the following:
Active@ File-recovery
File recovery - photos,videos,docs - cgsecurity
GRC Hard drive data recovery software
Oemailrecovery CD DVD HDDVD Blu-Ray Recovery Free
Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download
TestDisk - data,partition, disk recovery software - cgsecurity
I've found TestDisk to be good and best is the Active@ program, however, the program is not free.

You might have better luck if you create 2 partitions (neither larger than ~2.2 TB). Check this out to see if it relates to your issue:

Everything You Need to Know About 3TB Hard Drives | PCWorld

Kind of odd that the machine sees it okay when connected via USB, but maybe it just has an issue when connected directly via an ATA port.

I believe that these drives do something custom to get past the 2TB limit for XP. It must be something beyond just using GPT on the drive, so the format isn't a standard that Windows can figure out how to interpret. If it were just XPT, your Windows 7 x64 should be able to deal with it.

I was able to get the system to recognize the full 3TB drive by plugging the 3TB hard drive directly into the Gigabyte mobo. Previously, the 3TB drive was plugged into a Rosewill 4 port RC-218 PCI Express SATA II controller card. I haven't looked too deeply into it, but i'm hoping I can update the driver so that this card recognizes 3TB drives.

The issue still remains though because now Disk Manager shows the entire 3TB as a disk that is Not Initialized.

How do I get the system to recognize this drive? Why is it that the system recognizes the drive when it's using the external USB controller? Again, when it's using the external hdd controller, the system recognizes it as a 1 partition 3TB drive formatted as NTFS as a primary partition.

I'm currently scanning the drive with the MiniTool Partition Wizard, but i'm at 20%, and this looks like it's going to take a while....

More suggestions for a quick fix are welcome.

No quick fix.
Let us know the results.