Moving drives from USB cases to directly attached sata.

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richms

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#183930 3-Nov-2015 20:38

Previously I have only shucked 2TB or under drives so had no issue, or have done it from new so no data on the drive, so also no issue.

Now I have a giant sas box and card, I am wanting to move my shelf full of external drives into it.

Problem is, they are all formatted partition table, not GPT, so when I directly connect them, they show as 3 partitions and it wants to format it. No good.

Has anyone sucessfully converted the stock seagate partitions into a GPT drive on an external using testdisk or similar. They are only full of TV shows and movies and stuff, so I have not bothered to back them up but would like to move it without losing stuff if possible.

Otherwise I will have to swap the drives one at a time and clone the partiton from USB to the one in the sas box and then move the USB one to the box and repartition and then copy the next one. Too damn time consuming.

Richard rich.ms

richms

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#1420295 3-Nov-2015 23:41

Ok, On reading up on this some more its to do with the USB case converting the 512 byte virtual sector size of the drive back into a 4096 one, so that they can present it to the OS to work with crap old ones that only support partition tables. seems that there are mixed reports of being able to rebuild a GPT on the drive and have it work, so will not risk it.

Stupid legacy compatibility rubbish.

Richard rich.ms

pdath

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#1420302 4-Nov-2015 00:34

You are just wanting to attach the drives and have them appear individually? A non-GPT partition table should be fine. You should be able to plug the drive in, go into "Computer Management", "Disk Manager", and then just assign the partitions drive letters.

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richms

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#1420304 4-Nov-2015 00:59

The problem is the partition table is not valid when the drive is presented with 512 byte sectors which a direct connection does, thanks to this 512 byte emulation BS that drives do to support obsolete operating systems. The partition table is made when the drive was in the case so presented as 4096 byte sectors.

If the actual drive did that instead of emulating old crap for obsolete operating systems and there was not messing around in the USB bridge then it would be golden. Ah well. Hopefully this stupidity passes soon enough so that I don't have to worry about it when shucking external drives.

Im going to put some stuff on a drive and then put it into the case and see if testdisk can find a partition and make a new GPT for the drive and have the content accessible. If it works on one I will try it on the others, so at the moment I am clearing a drive out to try it on. HDDs are so damn slow.

Richard rich.ms