hard drive works in laptop but says unallocated in other computers

[bagellad]

Wondering if anyone else runs into this. I have had this happen a couple times and i am dealing with it again. I pull a hard drive out of a laptop and put it on my usb adapter and windows 7 doesnt read it.. and says its unallocated space under storage, doesnt change if its initiated but i put it back in the laptop and the hard drive is read normally. The current one is a windows 8 laptop hard drive and my main rig is a windows 7 machine Any ideas?

 

[HCHTech]

I'd be looking at that USB adapter. Does it work if you connect it directly to your bench computer's motherboard?

 

[OaksLabs]

Try booting from a linux live CD or hooking the drive into a linux OS. If linux sees it we know it is a Windows thing (I find that Windows is very fickle about recognising drives...)

 

[kwest]

Wondering if anyone else runs into this. I have had this happen a couple times and i am dealing with it again. I pull a hard drive out of a laptop and put it on my usb adapter and windows 7 doesnt read it.. and says its unallocated space under storage, doesnt change if its initiated but i put it back in the laptop and the hard drive is read normally. The current one is a windows 8 laptop hard drive and my main rig is a windows 7 machine Any ideas?

Encrypted maybe?

 

[Larry Sabo]

The drive probably has 4K sectors, versus 512-byte sectors. The USB adapter is not designed to deal with 4K sectors but the more modern laptop MB is. Using a new USN 3.0-compatible drive dock will probably allow it to be recognized by old and new computers alike.

 

[Krynn72]

The drive probably has 4K sectors, versus 512-byte sectors. The USB adapter is not designed to deal with 4K sectors but the more modern laptop MB is. Using a new USN 3.0-compatible drive dock will probably allow it to be recognized by old and new computers alike.

I've run into this a few times too and this makes a lot of sense. I remember being completely confused as to why a drive would read ok on certain sata-usb bridges but not others, and its probably because they were usb 2 and usb 3. Thanks for the info!

 

[lcoughey]

First off, you shouldn't initialize a disk if you are trying to access the data...especially if there is a software disk encryption on the drive. My gut feeling is that the USB bridge you are using is the issue, as mentioned above. You can easily rule this out by connecting the drive directly to your system's SATA port.

 

[nlinecomputers]

I'm gonna say this now and yes people will blast me for it but it is simple truth. Using a USB port to access a drive is being a pizza tech. I NEVER use them unless I have no other choice. I.E. I am on location and all I have is a laptop. If I am doing any kind of data recovery, diagnostics, data transfers then I pull the drive and put it into my eSATA drive toaster. USB doesn't give direct access to the drive!

 

[lcoughey]

I'm gonna say this now and yes people will blast me for it but it is simple truth. Using a USB port to access a drive is being a pizza tech. I NEVER use them unless I have no other choice. I.E. I am on location and all I have is a laptop. If I am doing any kind of data recovery, diagnostics, data transfers then I pull the drive and put it into my eSATA drive toaster. USB doesn't give direct access to the drive!

Good thing this new forum only allows for likes and no longer allows for dislikes. I agree that direct SATA/eSATA is best when dealing with drives of questionable condition, but for simple data transfers, USB 3 should be sufficient. That said, it is my opinion that you shouldn't be connecting a client original drive to system anyway. Rather, you should be cloning the drive first and connecting the clone.

 

[nlinecomputers]

I've had too many drives randomly drop connection to ever want to use a USB connection. And some systems USB 3 just don't work as advertised. I trust my bench system for data transfers and cloning. Anything else not so much.

 

[Krynn72]

I let circumstances dictate whether I use my bench machine or not. Frankly I'll use my bench machine with its hot swap bay because its easiest, and I can accurately get the smart data just while im at it. But if I'm already using that machine, for a regular data transfer, yeah I'll just use a USB adapter (not even my dock usually). It is annoying on some customer systems where the ports are dodge and the cable loses connection easily, but the times that happens are too few and far between to govern my choices on all such situations.

 

[PcTestCard.com]

I have reached some situation like this before. The reason for pulling off the HDD from laptop is majorly for backing up data, some HDD just not working using the external USB case no matter USB2.0 or 3.0. I would suggest try connect to the other desktop PC as a slave drive directly, most of time, this will work, also, if possible run the chkdsk command to scan the HDD on the laptop first, then use the external HDD case will work as well. But most of time, the laptop may not show the POST screen and that is why we need to pull the HDD off to back up data.

Hope this helps.
Bill
Senior IT consultant and Tech Support Manager.

 

[Larry Sabo]

if possible run the chkdsk command to scan the HDD on the laptop first

I would only do that if I had an image of the drive first, as chkdsk can delete records for which the file system is borked, making recovery impossible.