I am trying to find some information on if there is anyway to take a drive out of a seagate expansion usb enclosure and not have to reformat the drive for windows to recognize it properly. I read online that the sata to usb controller does something funky to the format of the drive to ensure that it is fully compatible with most computers. I've written a lot of data on a 4TB external drive. When I take it out of the enclosure windows 7 shows it as not formatted with 4 different partitions, I want to avoid re-copying all the data.

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

I guess it's encrypted.
do you have the picture of the usb controller

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The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving. -Albert Einstein

@OP What is the ultimate goal and why?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

The trouble is that Seagate's external drives are configured with 4KB sector sizes. When you remove such a drive from its enclosure and attach it to a SATA controller on your computer's motherboard, you expose the drive's native 512e sectoring and render the file system inaccessible. Sector 0 is still in the same place, so you still see the partition table. However, every other sector is out by a factor of 8, so the boot sectors of each volume cannot be found. Basically what you have is a 4Kn file system on 512e hardware.

Worse still, the drive is partitioned in MBR mode when inside the enclosure. The 4KB sectoring is able to circumvent the 32-bit LBA limit, but this breaks down when using 512e sectoring. Therefore you need GPT partitioning to see the entire drive in SATA mode.

There are data recovery tools that will be able to recover your data, but I doubt that there is any easy way to convert your file system.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The easiest solution: You could just put the drive in another USB enclosure

Why are you taking the drive out of the enclosure? I see two options:

1. Copy the data to another drive from the drive while it is still in the enclosure, then remove the drive, format it and then copy the data back...assuming that you have a reason why you need the data on this exact drive.

2. Use a data recovery program like R-Studio to copy all the files from the drive removed from the enclosure to another drive, then format the drive and copy the files back.

Either way, you will need another hard drive on which to copy your files.

Mind you, if the only copy of your files is on this drive, you seriously need to consider getting a backup solution setup to avoid data loss moving forward.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

It may not be that easy. You would need to find an enclosure that is configured with 4KB sectors rather than the more common 512B types.

In any case, ISTM that the OP doesn't really have a problem with the drive. I suspect that lazybummm just wants to convert an external drive for internal use.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks guys for all the responses. My ultimate goal is to convert the external drive to internal use. This is the first time I cracked open a drive larger than 2TB, so I was a bit surprised when windows saw 4 partitions that ranged from 600gb to 1.2TB.

I took it out because the drive was running at 55C in its enclosure and that's beyond my comfort zone. Anyway, I have resorted to taking the top of the enclosure off and putting a 120mm fan right over it to keep it cool (with power coming from inside the case) ghetto I know. but I am still hooking it up through USB 3.0

The information has been very helpful, I will play around to see if data can be possibly recovered in a linux environment through sata. If there is any trouble there, it's probably not worth using the stupid USB 3.0 enclosure if it complicates data recovery (hopefully I'll never need to).