After using two WD 4TB USB3.0 drive for about a month they both suddenly don’t show up in Windows after that I tried to install a USB 3.0 hub. I’ve deinstalled the hub but the drives don’t show up in Windows and also don’t show up in Windows Diskmanagement. I’ve read the FAQ, tried several power and several data cables and also tried the drives on another PC’s but the drives never show up. Als the drive shows the blinking led and makes the normal spinning sound that I was used to I don’t expect the drive to be damaged. The drives storage capacity is about to be miximal (more than 3.0 TB used) and maybe there is a problem to show up the device after that is holds more than 3 TB of data.
However, my problem is that I need acces to the data. Warranty would not solve my problem so that’s why I decided to open the enclosure and examine the internal hard disk. It shows that the drive is a Hitachi HDS5C 4TB SATA drive. I managed to mount the drive at a free SATA port and after booting, WIndows still doesn’t show the drive but the drive now shows up in Disk management. However it says that there is a capacity of 1677,90 GB that is not allocated and I need to choose foor converting to MBR or GPT. Since it is a large capacity drive I’ve choosen to convert to GPT but the capacity still is the same after conversion. I’ve found a tool called HGST GPT Disk Manager and after installing the tool, disk manager shows the srive to have a size of about 3.8 TB which is not allocated. The only option available is to add a new volume but the Windows Disk Management Wizard says it will format this volume also. So now I am afraid to lose all my data. Maybe this is the only way to have the drive back in Windows so that I need to use a data recovery tool the recover all data back. Is there someone who have been through these steps before me or someone who can advise me what to do in order to try to have my data remain as best as possible on the disk?
