Double- and triple-check that all of the assembly instructions were followed and that the drive is attached correctly. I’d make absolutely certain that the drive was properly connected to the interface card in that external enclosure. You know there’s an issue with the first computer that needs to be addressed.īecause you indicated you placed your former internal drive into an external enclosure, I’m suspicious there’s a problem with the assembly.Ī working USB interface improperly connected to a hard drive could appear as an unformatted drive.If you have another computer available, plug the external drive into that and see if it is properly recognized. If you have information on a Mac or Linux formatted hard drive (or thumbdrive) you’ll either need to copy the data to your PC some other way, or, on your Mac or Linux machine, copy it to a disk formatted using a PC-compatible filesystem. If you are in a situation where you need interoperability, using exFAT, or even NTFS, is generally the most cross-platform compatible. Mac and Linux machines tend to use different formats by default which are not readable by Windows.

Windows generally uses NTFS, or variations of the FAT file system, as disk formats. Specifically, the fact that while Windows will recognize hard disks formatted by other Windows machines, hard disks formatted on Mac and Linux machines will appear as unformatted when connected to a PC. There is one software issue that’s worth mentioning before we diagnose hardware, and that’s file systems. More at: Can I Use an Internal Hard Drive from an Old Machine as an External Drive on a New One? File system The technique discussed here - taking an older machine’s hard drive and placing it into an external drive enclosure - is a common and convenient technique, not only for copying data from the old machine but also for continuing to use the drive in a new and perhaps more flexible role.

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