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512/4096 problem

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I am hoping that someone can help me with a 512/4096 issue. I am trying to replace a 1tb ssd on my Windows 10 laptop with a 4tb ssd, this the second drive, not the main one. I used an old enclosure for the 4tb and proceeded to try and clone the drive. I received a 512/4096 error and I assumed that it had to do with the new drive not being formatted. I did a full format and tried to clone again with the same result. 

I had manually backed up my files previously, so I decided to just swap the drives, copy the files manually and install any programs I had running on that drive. When I did that, I ran into another problem. The drive doesn't show up with a letter, but when I go through Disk Management I do see it, but when I right click to try to format it, everything is grayed out, I am not able to do anything with it.

I placed it back on the enclosure and the drive works fine. How can I install it on the laptop and have Windows recognize it? Help.

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ASan, welcome to these public User Forums.

How does your laptop boot into Windows?  Is this a Legacy / MBR boot system, or is it a UEFI / GPT one?  You can check this by running the msinfo32 command in Windows and looking at the BIOS mode value shown in the report right panel column.

Your 4TB drive most likely requires to be using GPT to be recognised correctly.

With regards to migrating the data from your 1TB drive to the new 4TB drive, then you could make a Files & Folders backup of the old drive and recover this to the new one, or else use a file synchronisation program with both drives connected.

Note: you will need to set the drive letter for the new drive as the same letter used by the old drive if you have any programs using that drive.

ASan,

It sounds like your 4TB drive was at sometime used in a Linux system and was formatted as a strictly 4096 sector size drive.  This is a problem with Windows OS as MS uses a 512/4096 standard. 

Provided are two links about this that will hopefully help you resolve the issue you face.  The first link is more informational and explains the 512/4096 sector relationship.  The second link is a forum thread which discusses the problem I point out and a remedy method.

https://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-dr…

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=1587d9dc28215…

The error message box may appear during restoring or cloning your drive. The issue indicates that the destination disk's sector size is bigger than the source disk's, or that you're using a USB disc enclosure that changes the disk's stated sector size. This is not acceptable. First, check the disk sector size. You can check it by typing system information in windows search. Expand 'Components' > 'Storage' and pick 'Disks' in the new window that appears. In the right window, a list of any locally attached discs will be presented. The sector size will be displayed in the 'Bytes/Sector' field.
So, what exactly is the issue? The Master File Table is data found in the NTFS file system (MFT). The MFT is an important component of the file system since it defines all of the files and folders. If the disc sectors size is 512 bytes, the MFT contains records,' each of which is 1024 bytes long. This translates to two sectors on a 512-byte-per-sector drive. Each MFT record would represent a quarter of a sector if the complete file system was restored or cloned to a disc with a sector size of 4096 Bytes. Because a sector is indeed the smallest quantity of data which can be read / written to a disc, NTFS cannot read its own data directly! This difficulty is not present on 4K drives that support Extended Format 512e, as these discs provide direct access to 512 bytes of data.