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3 external USB drives to internal HDD on new desktop;all "Unallocated"
Dear friends,
Fed up of having so many scattered USB external drives around my laptop + monitor set up, I went and purchased a tower case with plenty of room, with the fine intention to open my USB 3.0 external drives and by removing the sata to usb powered adapter, connect them using the cables provided by the case manufacturer NZXT 820 Phantom.
I run on an SSD (Samsung EVO 1TB) with Windows 7 64 bits, have more than enough RAM (32 DDR4 GB), an ASUS 170Z Deluxe motherboard with the latest i7 6700 4-4.2GHz and a GTX 680Ti for my graphics.
Anyway, I opened three of my external USB drives and shoved them into case slots, connecting the power from the power supply and the data cables to the proper places on the M.B. The thing is that when I started the computer, not one of the drives showed up in my windows "My PC". Sure enough, I entered the disc management window and they were there, with the right size and all... but with a black line under them and stating them as "Unallocated" drives.
Searching the web I came across some great comments from Jumanji, and followed his instructions to try and sort out the problem.
But before searching for help, I tried as a last resort to re-plug the drives to their USB 3.0 to sata connectors, "knowing" that at least I could regain access to the drives.... Well NO, that did not happen, because I got the same result as with the internal test, that is, still "Unallocated" drives
Something must have happened when I removed the USB to HDD connector and plugged them to the PC directly. Biggest problem here is that these 3TB WD drives have almost all my backups and random data plus tons of photographs that I dare not lose.
Right not I'm in the process of running one of the drives with TestDisk 7.0, but it is such a slow process, that I decided to drop you a line and see if I could gather more information.
Oh, and one last thing, I have two ICY BOX drive cases, with 4TB drives, that I emptied and also dropped them into the huge Phantom case... and what do you know, they are running happily as ever inside the new PC... how can that be???
Best regards to all and specially to Jumanji for posting such detailed info on how to run TestDisk.
Spanish Flyer