HGST 5TB asking to be reformatted repeatedly

[Showtime]

EDIT: Answered all my questions. Hopefully everything will work fine now that I have a better understanding of things. Thx for all the replies. I usually search for answers, but this saved me a lot of time/headaches, and I appreciate it.

Hi,

I recently grabbed a new HGST 5TB hd for my desktop, and had problems getting it to format in Windows 8. This is my 1st large drive in years. My last new drive was a 2 TB Samsung which has had no issues. Unfortunately, I accidentally reformatted that samsung drive while repeatedly trying to install the new drive late into the night.

I had to use sw to get the new drive to work, and went with a single partition of 4.xxTB. I recovered the files off the 2TB, and moved them to the HGST using some freeware since I didn't have Easus on my desktop. I couldn't see all the files, and followed various guides to try different things. I could see that there was over 1TB of data in the properties, but there was only a few GB's of data that I think was from the trash. Tried to take ownership, and show hidden files, but so far no luck.

My win 8 laptop has a full copy of Easus, so I pulled the HGST 5tb drive, and put it in an external storage to try to recover the data there. It found the drive, but said it needed to be formatted. So I did that again since I figured I'd just try to pull the data from my desktop afterwards. The drive seemed to work right, but when I put it back in my desktop, it showed only 500gb. I deleted the partition, and reformatted to a single 4.xxTB partition. It seems to work again, but now I don't trust it. I feel like any time I restart it, it could ask to be reformatted. It seems to work fine, and passes the basic checks.

Does Windows 8/10 have issues with 5TB partitions? Should I reformat it to 2 smaller partitions; 2TB, and 2.xxTB? Does it sound more like the drive is bad even it passed windows checkdisk?

I have questions about recovery, but I'll probably ask them later if I can't figure it out.

TIA!

Desktop
Asus Gryphon Z87 with i7
16 GB DDR 3
Kingston HyperX 120 GB SSD UEFI
Samsung spinpoint 2 TB HD
HGST 5TB HD
Windows 8/ now "upgraded" to 10

 

[dave_the_nerd]

It's the enclosure's fault. Install EaseUS on your desktop, format the 5TB drive, do the clone, and throw the enclosure in the trash.

http://kb.easeus.com/art.php?id=10039

We have identified that a number of recent external USB enclosures will 'fake' 4096 Bytes per sector disks and cause the error above. This happens regardless of the actual sector size of the attached disk and even if the disk supports 512e.

When a lame-ass fakery enclosure that sucks formats a large drive with its lame-ass fakery, it screws up the formatting so only that dumb enclosure can read it, and if you take the drive and install it in a real computer w/ SATA the way God and The Baby Jesus intended, the drive and the controller are confused by the fake dumb enclosure's dirty leavings of stupidity. And then everything sucks and you get exactly the happenings that you're having happen.

 

[corkyg]

Unless you formatted GPT using UEFI, your system will not see such a large drive. Seagate's note applies:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218619en

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Unless you formatted GPT using UEFI, your system will not see such a large drive. Seagate's note applies:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218619en

If you install it internally, Windows won't let you format it any other way, at least so far as I can remember.

 

[corkyg]

If he is not running UEFI, and GPT format, it will keep asking for it.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Ah, I see.

**googles**

Yup. The Asus Gryphon Z87 should support UEFI.

 

[Showtime]

Ok I think I got it thanks to your replies. I will work on it when I get home tomorrow night. I think what happened was even though my SSD, and everything was set to UEFI in bios, something wasn't right formatting in Windows initially. Software fixed it. Then I put it in my external, and that screwed it all up. Then when I reinstalled the screwed up drive, it needed to be formatted again properly.

Question; will it be more flexible to use 2 partitions instead of one if I want to be able to run it on my existing external drive every so often to transfer files between my laptop? Will it get messed up again since it's a GBP drive?

Thx all!

Edit: Neat I got some trophies. It started out nice enough. Scout, lurker (getting creepy)... then it went all Elder, and ancient lol. Now I feel old haha. I'm always here, Anandtech. You will always be my goto tech site.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Question; will it be more flexible to use 2 partitions instead of one if I want to be able to run it on my existing external drive every so often to transfer files between my laptop?

Won't matter. If you plug it into a computer that can't deal with a 5TB advanced format disk, it won't matter if the partitions are 2x2.5TB or 1x 5TB - the computer will still have trouble reading it.

Will it get messed up again since it's a GPT drive?

As long as you 1) don't put it in an external enclosure that is terrible, and 2) don't connect it to a computer that isn't UEFI/GPT compatible, you shouldn't have any trouble with it.

If you do, do not format it - that will delete all your data. Just put the drive back in the working computer and think of a different way to transfer your files. Maybe file sharing over a network.

 

[Showtime]

Thx Dave! That's what I figured from the replies. I'll just park it, and find other ways to transfer. I'm hoping this drive works out as well as my spinpoint has.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Dave's a great guy, and he knows his stuff.