"You need to format the disk in drive J: before you can use it" is shown, disk is not corrupted

2

I have a 7-8 years old laptop (HP EliteBook 6930p), running Windows XP with a 500GB SATA Hard Drive. The computer is painfully slow and I'm about to give it away as a donation, but first I would like to backup all my data in it.

I thought the easiest way to do this would be to take the HD out of the computer, and connect it to my new laptop using a SATA to USB adapter I have. I've unscrewed the HDD, connected it via the adapter to my new Windows 10 laptop, and I got a popup saying "You need to format the disk in drive J: before you can use it". At first I was panicked that I somehow got the disk corrupted, but when I connected it back to the old laptop it booted just fine and my data was there.

Why do I get this message saying the disk is not formatted, even though it obviously is? How can I connect this old HDD to my new computer to copy my files?

Some more information: The HDD has only one NTFS partition. I tried running testdisk command line tool and it told me that the boot sector is corrupted. I did not manage to "fix" it using testdisk tool (maybe because there's nothing to fix, the disk is just fine. It's just that my new computer can't read it). My SATA to USB adapter is not damaged because when I use it with another HDD everything works just fine.

Please do not suggest other ways to copy the files such as over LAN or cloud storage service. These won't work for me as the old computer can't connect to any network.

Green Mind

Posted 2016-03-10T22:59:43.643

Reputation: 31

Do you have any encryption on the old HDD? – Roco CTZ – 2016-03-10T23:08:50.217

nope, no encryption – Green Mind – 2016-03-10T23:21:56.873

Answers

0

Probably because you got an adapter that use a different logical sector size (e.g. 4K Bytes) than your SATA HDD (512 Bytes). I guess you need to try another adapter.

To confirm, run fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo <drive letter> when you have connected the 500GB drive to your old laptop (through SATA directly), and when you have connected the other HDD you mentioned:

My SATA to USB adapter is not damaged because when I use it with another HDD everything works just fine.

with the adapter (to any computer), and compare their Bytes Per Sectors.

Ref.: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848035%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Tom Yan

Posted 2016-03-10T22:59:43.643

Reputation: 4 744

Thanks, I compared both HDD devices (old one connected directly via SATA and a new one connected via the adapter), they both show exactly the same: Bytes Per Sector : 512 Bytes Per Physical Sector : 512 Bytes Per Cluster : 4096 Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024 – Green Mind – 2016-03-11T14:51:38.313

Asked: 2016-03-10T22:59:43.643

Viewed: 361 times

Active: 2016-03-11T08:10:36.250