SATA Hard Drive Not Being recognized via External Adapter

[muthabored]

I have a 120GB Western Digital SATA drive that I'm attempting to connect to my desktop via the Bytecc USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA adapter. Once the drive is connected (it spins and everything), I receive the notification that the hardware has been detected/the controller for the hard drive is being installed, etc. and then the last notification that the hardware is ready to use. However, the drive (which is formatted and partioned) doesn't show up in My Computer or under Disk Management. Has anyone ever used an external adapter similar to this one? If so, is there a step that I'm missing?

 

[muthabored]

Well, it appears as though it took a while but the drive now appears in My Computer/Disk Management but it's not showing the correct capacity. I don't want to format the hard drive because there's data on it. I've tried running chkdsk and nothing suspicious turns up/no errors. Any suggestions? I'm thinking I'll download the drive diagnostics from the Western Digital website for good measures but I'd hate to lose the data on the drive.

 

[wahnula]

The disk utilities will not overwrite the data. My recommendation would be to off-load the data via spooling to DVD or your main drive then overwriting the entire drive with Seagate utilities (write zeros) or running DBAN from:

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

then reformat& partition using Disk Management. BTW, you will NEVER see 120GB of available space...it will be more like 112 or so due to the discrepancy between how HDD makers & Windows see the drive:

"I have a 120 GB hard drive but Windows XP claims it's size is 111.8 GB. What has happened to the other 8.2 GB? "

Hard drive manufacturers calculate hard disk size in 'base 10' notation while Windows does the calculation in 'base 2' (binary) format. Both the manufacturer and Windows are giving you the "correct" number.

1 Gigabyte as defined by a manufacturer is 1,000,000,000,000 Bytes. This makes sense in the metric base 10 sense as we define kilo as 1000, mega as 1,000,000 and giga as 1,000,000,000,000.

Windows, however, calculates the disk size in a base 2 system. Base 2 does not convert into base 10 exactly in most cases but back in the day it was close enough so that a kilobyte was defined as 2^10 or 1024.

2^10 is 1024 is 1 kilobyte
2^20 is 1048576 or 1 megabyte
2^30 is 1073741824 or 1 gigabyte

When the hard disk manufacturer sold you a 120 Gig hard drive, they were selling you 120,000,000,000 bytes. Windows divides this number by what it considers a GB (1073741824) and reports the hard disk size as:

120000000000 (bytes) / 1073741824 (bytes per GB) = 111.8 GB

This accounts for the 'missing' 8.2 GB in the hard disk's size. You still have 120,000,000,000 bytes to use but because of inconsistent definitions of what kilo, mega and giga really represent, there is an inconsistency in the measurement of size.

From:

http://www.diskview.com/disk-size-discrepancy.htm

Tony

 

[specter333]

I have one of those Bytech adapters that has worked great for me for over a year now that I purchased from New Egg. The user reviews on their website show a split about who they work for and who they don’t, reading the reviews may give you some insight. I suspect that as cheesy as cheaply as the company makes their products, the quality control isn’t any better than their documentation. The problem may be in the adapter itself. If you have access to another external adapter or enclosure I would try one of those before reformatting.