How to troubleshoot my Bytecc T-300D dual SATA docking station not recognizing 1TB drives

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I've a Lenovo laption running Windows 7, Premium Home Edition, 64-bit (service pack 1), and I bought a Bytecc T-300D to help with my data.

I have three drives. A 500MB Seagate, 1TB Samsung, and a 1TB WD.

The 500MB drive works just fine, in either of the two docks, but neither the 1TB drives show up in the explorer as an available drive in either dock (alone or paired with the 500MB drive).

The web page says there's no driver needed - so I can't figure out what to update. I have the toggle switch on the back set to PC (as opposed to Clone).

What can I do next to figure out why my 1TB drives don't work? The WD drive is brand new, so I'm doubting that both of them have suffered from hardware failure. I hear both of them spin up when the docking station is turned on. And the windows machine makes the little "ba-bum!" sound you get when a USB device is plugged in and the 1TB drives are in (no sound when the docks are empty).

Edited to add: After running diskmgmt.msc as suggested by Karan, I do see the 1TB drives.

The first shows up as "Online" in the diskmgmt and has 2 partitions: a 200MB Healthy EFI System Partition, and a 931GB Healthy primary partition.

The second shows up as "Unknown" in the diskmgmt and has 931GB of unallocated space.

So now my question becomes, how do I assign a letter to the drive manually, and longer-term, how do I get it to happen automatically in the future? I presume I need to format the disk with unallocated space. I don't see any "assign letter" menu options in any of the menus.

Trey Jackson

Posted 2015-05-19T04:37:04.470

Reputation: 3 731

"Don't work" in what sense? What does Disk Management (Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc) show? Perhaps for some reason the drives are not being assigned letters, so if that's the case you can do so manually. – Karan – 2015-05-19T05:23:12.477

@Karan - I updated the question with the information you asked for, thanks. Now there's more to the question. – Trey Jackson – 2015-05-19T15:00:28.237

Right-clicking a partition should show Change Drive Letter and Paths or similar. If there's no data worth keeping, I suggest deleting any existing partitions till the entire drive is unallocated, then creating a new simple NTFS partition spanning the entire drive. Make sure to select the option to assign a drive letter. It should show up in Explorer then. If it still doesn't work and the drives work fine when connected to a desktop or via a USB enclosure, I would blame the dock. – Karan – 2015-05-19T16:44:15.847

@Karan, thanks. I did find that Change Drive Letter menu finally for the new disk, but it doesn't show for the old one (I got it from my brother - perhaps it's set up for a Mac). I'd accept this all as an answer if you want to put it there (if you don't, I'll put this info as an answer after a day or two). – Trey Jackson – 2015-05-19T16:58:48.053

Physical drives are not supposed to show up in explorer as an available drive. It would be incredibly bizarre if they did. (What would happen if you dragged a file to it and the physical drive had no partitions? Or 8 partitions?) – David Schwartz – 2015-05-19T17:19:15.887

Answers

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As per the discussion in the comments above, the suggested solution is to add a drive letter to the drives, and if that doesn't work, to delete all existing partitions, re-partition and reformat the drives as NTFS via Disk Management. Since one of the drives might have a HFS/HFS+ Mac partition, the latter would be required anyway.

Karan

Posted 2015-05-19T04:37:04.470

Reputation: 51 857