SOLVED Windows 7 doesn't see my storage drive

[LutaWicasa]

You sayin' Bill Gates gets nun?

 

[Alaric]

You sayin' Bill Gates gets nun?

He is this year! LOL

 

[Alaric]

Back to my issue, I'm using TeraCopy to stash a few copies of the drive in question and noticed something odd. After trying several methods of saving copies (being very careful at this point) I noticed Explorer, ImgBurn, and TeraCopy, all seem to have a hard time with flac files. Has anyone else had this come up?

 

[Vishera]

I mean, I know I had to install a third party codec on 7 to get WMP to play .flac but I never noticed anything odd in Explorer itself.

 

[Alaric]

Another question. The HDD is currently formatted NTFS, but with a GPT partition. So far none of my reformatting options include making it a MBR instead of GPT. I can't even do it in Disk Management. I can probably do it by inserting an OS DVD and having set up do it but is there an easier way? This is in W10. No options at all in W7 for this drive.

 

[knoober]

Another question. The HDD is currently formatted NTFS, but with a GPT partition. So far none of my reformatting options include making it a MBR instead of GPT.

I just skimmed something about this the other day so I know it can be done. I *think* the commands are "mbrconvert" and "gptconvert" but you will have to Google the usage. It was just a point I happen to remember while I was doing other searches, so I didn't pay a whole lot of attention

 

[Alaric]

That sounds like diskpart through .cmd. Hmmm. Except the HDD has no drive letter to use in the command. LOL

 

[knoober]

I know you can't set a drive letter in disk management but can you use diskpart?

 

[LutaWicasa]

Would this shed any light?

 

[Alaric]

The MBR partition method is not recommended for disks larger than 2 terabytes.

That kind of gums up the works. And that page would seem to indicate that W7 can actually do something with a GPT partitioned disk (like see it and access the data), which has not been my experience so far. Screeching halt to the process right there. Did W10 do something stupid to the HDD solely to prevent it's use on older OS'???

Pulls out more hair in 3...2...

 

[LutaWicasa]

Forget all that...I was pointing towards not being able to go from GPT to MBR without full data loss.
Since you've moved data off that drive...delete partitions and start from scratch.

 

[Alaric]

That was the plan. I'm lacking confidence in W7 seeing a GPT partition, though.

 

[LutaWicasa]

So, go ahead and convert to MBR. If ya can't have full disk, in Win7 re-convert to GPT.

Have a read.

 

[Alaric]

I haven't been home all day. I want to back up my music folder and some other stuff 3 or 4 times/places before I wipe the HDD. I have dozens of Harley factory service manuals, and a score of other stuff I really don't want to lose. I'll try a GPT made from in W7 and see if Explorer can see it first. Failing that, I'll have to do two, 2 TB, MBR partitions on the drive to circumvent the 2 TB limit on MBR drives. This is just silly. LOL

 

[Alaric]

I tried to assign a drive letter in disk part, hoping that would fix it. Disk part sees the drive, but says there are no volumes so I can't assign a letter, and it shows two partitions on the drive. Partition 1 is 128 MB and partition 2 is 3725 GB. How do I have two partitions and no volumes? LOL

OK. Just tried "select disk 0", "select partition 2", "assign letter=I", and was told no volume was specified and to please select a volume and try again.

 

[knoober]

Well that is odd, so I checked it out and found that the difference between a "volume" and a "partition " is whether it is on a "dynamic disk" or "basic disk" . I think this is promising, and that you might be able to fix this issue from diskpart. I will look more into the difference between those types of disk later (might just be that you have to assign the partition as active or something) but for now I'm glad you have a solid fallback solution


Edit: my first thought was that the small partition was the "protection" mentioned in Luta's link for GPT, but I think it would be wise to make certain of what is in there, perhaps some sort of Win10 goodie. Once again (since I'm curious) I will see what I can find about the size of the GPT "protection", but if it does not say the exact size of that little partition then

 

[Alaric]

All my disks are showing as basic in disk management. In W7, anyway.

 

[knoober]

So here is what I found out.... "Protective MBR" starts on sector 0 and has a minimum size of "16,384 bytes". also the only way to change from basic to dynamic is to reformat. I didnt see anything to indicate that there was a problem with your procedure -- so it should have worked. diskpart CAN change the letter for basic disks as well as dynamic. I was really hopefull for diskpart but now Im throwing in the towel and voting for a good old fashioned reformat (after backup of course)

 

[Alaric]

That's where I am with it, too. My glitch there is the type of partition. W7 should be able to see a GPT partition, but it doesn't in this case. And I did get that warning from Disk Management indicating "earlier versions" of Windows can't see it. The info I read about MBR is the 2 TB limit. The best I can figure at this point is W10 did some weird *&#@ to the HDD and earlier versions can't see it-sort of.

 

[LutaWicasa]

Have you not yet managed to get your data off this drive?