(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); hey guys just recently got a new hard drive for my computer, and have that working properly. so i bought an enclosure for my old hard drive and when i plug it in with the old nclosure it "You need to format disk drive before you can use it". could it be that my computer only recognizes the drive in the port inside my laptop? and not on any usb port? if so how can i make it recognizable via usb, without formatting the drive and erasing everything on it?

what enclosure did you buy, just curious...
and are you using your old hdd with usb right, not sata?
and a possible work around. I had this problem once with my exhdd but I would click the little up arrow at the bottom right of the task bar, find my hdd, right click and hit browse files and it would work. But also mine only asked me to format every now and then, sometime I just had to unplug it and plug it back it and it would work. Do you think it may have gotten damaged when it was out of your computer also?

Why not plug your old HDD back into your PC and make a clone then you can just copy it to your new HDD and get the things you want from it then erase it. Also try opening 'Administration Tools', select 'Computer Management', click on 'isk Management' and see if it can be seen here. If it does show here, chances are it doesn't have a drive letter assigned. If this is the case, right click on the drive, select "Change drive Letter...', and assign a drive letter to it.

If it was not seen there, go to 'Action' on the menu bar, click on 'Rescan Disks' and it should come up. If necessary assign a drive letter to as described above.

i got this one You must login or register to view this content. the reason i got the new hard drive is because the old one had bad sectors (could this be my problem?) it works fine inside my computer but when i plug it in with the enclosure it keeps on reconizing and unreconizing the drive over and over (keeps making the sound on windows 7) and then just opens up a bunch of windows ones that i can see the data on the drive and windows that ask me to format it.

ill tell you the same thing i told the other guy
the reason i got the new hard drive is because the old one had bad sectors (could this be my problem?) it works fine inside my computer but when i plug it in with the enclosure it keeps on reconizing and unreconizing the drive over and over (keeps making the sound on windows 7) and then just opens up a bunch of windows ones that i can see the data on the drive and windows that ask me to format it.

so i guess technically it is getting reconized, and i can't clone a drive with bad sectors, or I would have already done that hahah

Oh, lol then the most logical explanation would be the adapter, because if it works find connected to your mb and not when using the adapter then that about sums that up. I have gotten usb adapters before and sometimes they do funny things or just don't work. So im going to assume the problem is the usb adapter.

I guess make sure you have your hdd plugged in all the say, give it some force, sata is hard somethings. Reading a few reviews, people have had similar problems. If you have made sure it in fully plugged in then it my be defective and you might have to send it back or get another one.

alright so i can access things on the drive and can copy a file from the drive to my computer but i can't write to it. if i make a word document and drag it onto the drive it says i don't have privaleges to do so. so i think it is a security/administrative thing? any idea or help?

Ok found this on another forum try it and let me know.

1. Open a Command prompt by clicking Start, typing command, and clicking Command Prompt.

2. Type diskpart and press Enter.

3. Type list volume and press Enter.

4. Type select volume #, where # is the number of the drive that's giving you the "write-protected" error. In my case, I ended up typing select volume 3.

5. Type attributes disk clear readonly and press Enter.

6. Type exit and press Enter.

That's it! Now you should have full write access to the problem drive.

I can tell you that this happened to me and with 99% certainty I can say that the drive is on its way out the door. The Bad Sectors are almost certainly the reason as to why this is happening. The only way that I managed to recover the data from my drive was by installing Linux onto a USB and plugging in the Hard Drive when I was booted into Linux and transferring all the files that I needed from the damaged hard drive to a new one. I know that there's something with Windows and S.M.A.R.T. or something that causes this to happen, while it doesn't occur on Linux. If you truly value the data on the drive, I wouldn't take chances frankly.

so if i format it, i can still use it? or is it basically a paper weight?