Hi all, new guy here. I posted this same issue on Tom's Hardware and was pointed in a general direction of progress, but I'm hoping I can get a little more help from you people here.

I'm trying to recover data from an external HDD (iOmega Prestige Portable 500GB HDD, model no. 31922800). The USB port on the SATA/USB bridge that is built into the enclosure has physically separated from the bridge board. I opened the enclosure and removed the bridge board from the HDD and physically connected the HDD to my computer using a SATA-USB cable, but Windows is seeing the HDD as an "unformatted drive".

At first I was told that it might an encryption issue, but when I posted the contents of sector 0, I later learned that it had to do with the file system. This is where I start to get a little unclear on what is actually happening. From what I understand, the HDD is using 4Kb (4Kn) sector sizes but Windows is assuming that the HDD is using 512B sector sizes, so when Windows tries to read the data, it just thinks it's a jumbled mess. This is about the limit of where my knowledge extends. I know something about physical vs. logical addressing, but I don't know what's actually going on, I don't know how the HDD is actually formatted, I don't know if the firmware in the HDD is doing something, I don't know if the firmware on the SATA/USB bridge was doing, and I don't know what to do from here.

What I DO know is that the data is still intact, and a scan by DMDE shows that the data is still potentially accessible.

What I learned today is that Seagate apparently builds HDDs for Samsung, the go-to sector size is transitioning to 4Kb from 512B to support larger file systems and larger HDD's, and that Windows 7 either DOES or DOES NOT support 4K-native sector sizes.....

I posted an album of pictures to illustrate my struggle [url="http://imgur.com/a/uaz83"]here[/url] if you'd like to see for yourself what's going on.

I'll be pretty active for a while, so hopefully we can get some good learning up in here. Thanks everyone!

The HDD has a 512-byte logical sector size. It is the firmware on the USB-SATA bridge board that is telling the outside world that the USB mass storage device has a 4096-byte sector size. The OS sees a 4Kn device, but the firmware translates this 4096-byte logical block into 8 x 512-byte sectors before it passes it on to the HDD. The reason that manufacturers do this is so that they can use big drives (> 2TiB) with a legacy OS such as Windows XP.

In short, get your local TV/AV repair shop to reattach the USB connector, even if they need to use individual wires.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

What the...fzabkar!? Hahaha, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised to find you here and on TH. Thanks to you, I've learned a lot!

What you describe sounds a little redundant since I'm not using a legacy OS. The HDD has a 512B logical sector size, but the physical sector size is actually 4KB? The LBA printed on the label is 976,773,168 which corresponds to a 512B sector size for a 500GB HDD...so if I understand correctly, that's 976,773,168 logical blocks of 512B in size, but (according to DMDE), is actually 121,916,928 physical blocks of 4KB in size?

This is making my head spin, but it's progress. Thanks for the quick reply. At this point, it's more about just understanding how it all works. I'll see about getting someone to physically repair the bridge board.

Likewise, I was surprised to find a sub-2TB drive in a 4Kn enclosure, but that's what you have.

If you dump the contents of the boot sector with DMDE, you will see that the file system was built around a 4096-byte sector size. You can do this by selecting Mode -> Hexadecimal, Editor -> Goto Offset, Sector = 8. You should then see an NTFS boot sector. Now select Edit -> Select Block, Edit -> Export to Text File. If you upload the resulting text file, someone will be able to analyse it for you.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

First you need to understand that a SATA drive and a USB drive are two separate devices
For the SATA drive:
- Physical sectors are 4K but you can't access them on a user level, so you can forget about them for now
- Logical sectors for that particular drive are 512b, that's what you can access through SATA on the host side on the user level

For the USB drive
- USB drive consists of USB-to-SATA controller and SATA drive, SATA drive is an input device for USB-to-SATA controller and normally OS won't have access to actual SATA device but rather USB interface from the USB-to-SATA controller. As we know SATA drive has 512b sectors on the user level
- Some USB-to-SATA controllers emulate 4K sectors, so they take eight 512b sectors from a SATA drive and tell that it would be only one 4K sector that would be available through USB, that's how OS sees it and that's why when you take SATA drive out of USB enclosure and connect it directly to OS it refuses to see file system

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.