Windows 10 harddrive inaccessible - GPT Protective Partition

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rmt38

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#198752 21-Jul-2016 11:48

I bought a harddrive and got someone to copy some files onto it for me, but after the drive arrived and I mounted it in an external desktop drive case to connect to my laptop via USB, it is inaccessible The drive is found via USB 3 on the laptop, and recognised, but not mounted as a drive letter. In Disk Management it appears as a drive with one GPT protective partition of around 7500GB in size. Disk management offers no options whatsoever, they're all greyed out.

My laptop is Windows 10.
The tower case it was mounted in and the files copied on was Windows 10
The drive is a Seagate 8TB archive HDD 3.5" SATA 5600RPM 128M.
The external desktop drive case is a "Seagate expansion desktop drive" with an existing 4TB drive inside it.

Does anyone know why the partition is inaccessible and what to do about it?

Dynamic

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#1596134 21-Jul-2016 12:21

Are you possibly running 32bit Windows?

I suggest having a read here: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207837en?language=en_US

“Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.” Douglas Adams

rmt38

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#1596140 21-Jul-2016 12:26

Dynamic:

Are you possibly running 32bit Windows?

I suggest having a read here: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207837en?language=en_US

64 bit OS (Windows 10), x64 processor.

I read the link, still a mystery.

rmt38

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#1596311 21-Jul-2016 15:17

Okay, I went and got an enclosure from an older WD drive I bought in the past. That one mounted the drive as a letter, and allowed the top level directories to be viewed in Windows Explorer. But any attempt to access the directories popped up some invalid access error.

What this suggests to me is that the problem isn't with Windows and the drive, it's with Windows and the drivers the enclosures have, and whether they can handle this drive.

Any suggestions for a cheap hardware purchase that might have better driver support for 8TB drives and can allow them to connect to laptops or other usb devices?

rmt38

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#1596337 21-Jul-2016 15:46

It gets worse!

I've been looking at external hard drive enclosures and none I could find in NZ support 8TB, they all explicitly state supporting lesser sizes. The only option is an enclosure and drive from Noel Leemings for $550 or so. I'd get it if I needed another 8TB drive and the price was comparable.

So I look on newegg.. options there. Wait, select NZ as a destination, options disappear. So I look on Amazon, options there. Wait, I read the description.. supports 8TB drives and above! I read further down.. supports up to 8TB drives. I read further down.. supports ....... etc. Three mismatched claims on that one product.

What a mess. Do these people not want to sell products or something? Either not available for shipping to NZ, or the description is ambiguous, and if so, there are unanswered questions from ages ago asking what I want to know.

Dynamic

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#1596342 21-Jul-2016 15:53

Sometimes you run into trouble like this when you are on the bleeding (leading) edge of technology.

“Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.” Douglas Adams

rmt38

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#1596371 21-Jul-2016 15:59

Dynamic:

Sometimes you run into trouble like this when you are on the bleeding (leading) edge of technology.

I'm just glad the problem is this straightforward and has a logical reason!

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rmt38

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#1596380 21-Jul-2016 16:06

I forgot to add that this is the solution I went with:

ORICO 6518US3-V1 USB 3.0 Hard Disk Drive Enclosure Case - US PLUG BLACK

$26NZ, free shipping. That's cheaper than the dated solutions available elsewhere. Looking on Newegg description, it says "supports 3.5-inch SATA drives up to 8TB" which is pretty definitive, and as there's only one slot, it can't mean between the two slots as some enclosure descriptions state.

Even if it doesn't work for 8TB, it's a cheap upgrade from the dismantled WD and Seagate sealed units that I bought in the past from various countries.

Athlonite

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#1596393 21-Jul-2016 16:38

GPT protective partition sounds to me like to person you got the drive from uses drive encryption as most normal GPT partitions are not protected

rmt38

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#1603382 3-Aug-2016 10:18

Just got the hard drive enclosure. Some notes:

Shipped from Germany from the looks of the packaging.
Took 13 days to arrive.
Bought the US model, so US plug. But had AU/NZ plastic prong dongle included.
It can access the drive exactly like a working enclosure would (unlike my other two older ones).

I copied a large file from the drive to the hard drive and got 54 MB/s which is USB 2.0 levels of speed. My laptop claims to have USB 3, and the enclosure claims to be USB 3, so not sure if that can be improved or whether the speed is limited by the disk itself which is a seagate archive disk.

I'm going to think about replacing my other enclosures with more of these.