Windows 10: Hard drive not working in one external enclosure but does in another

I have two external USB hard drive enclosures, both Sabrent brands. One is a single bay model DFLT and I just got a new 4-bay enclosure model SC4B.I bought a new hard drive and installed it into the 4-bay SC4B enclosure, I then went to disk management and a window came up saying to format and initialize or something like that, I don't quite remember. Either way, it works fine.My issue is when I remove my old drive from the old single bay enclosure, and put it into the new 4-bay enclosure, windows does not list this drive in file explorer. Even though it was formatted and working fine. I

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Hard drive not working in one external enclosure but does in another

I have two external USB hard drive enclosures, both Sabrent brands. One is a single bay (model DFLT) and I just got a new 4-bay enclosure (model SC4B.)

I bought a new hard drive and installed it into the 4-bay SC4B enclosure, I then went to disk management and a window came up saying to format and initialize or something like that, I don't quite remember. Either way, it works fine.

My issue is when I remove my old drive from the old single bay enclosure, and put it into the new 4-bay enclosure, windows does not list this drive in file explorer. Even though it was formatted and working fine. I can put the old drive back into the old single bay enclosure and it shows up again just like it had been working before. Here is a screenshot from disk manager of the old drive in the old enclosure.





When I put the old drive into the new SC4B enclosure and go to disk management it does show the drive there. However, the drive does not have a drive letter assigned. It changes some info as well. There are two partitions shown. And it lists it as "GPT Protective Partition"





I've read a few posts where you can clean the drive, but that is only a way to reformat, and lose all the data to get it working. My question is why can't I just move a HDD from one enclosure to another? Sort of defeats my purpose of using external enclosures for backups. If the enclosure fails, there is no way for me to get the data from the drive?

 

Hard drive not working in one external enclosure but does in another

I've seen this problem before. A lot of enclosures write a proprietary "layer" onto the drive so that the drives work in the enclosure no matter what the sector size or the limitations of the master boot record. Unfortunately, that means that when you put the drive in a new enclosure, it won't work because the proprietary "layer" is from a different enclosure type.

I am guessing that is what is happening here despite being from the same manufacturer.

Move your data off the drive and reformat it on the 4 bay enclosure. I bet it will work, and you will have confirmed my suspicion. If not, we can try something else.

 

Hard Drive Enclosure

Hi Comeback, you should be able to access those files if you put that hard drive into an external enclosure . . .

When you connect that drive, does Windows actually see the drive - can you see it in File Explorer?

Open Disc Management (accessible by right clicking your Start Button

Do you see that drive listed there?