Wednesday, December 31, 2014

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

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.

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