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Last week my new (<1year), NTFS, single-partition, non-OS, BitLocker-encrypted Western Digital Red 3TB drive stopped mounting, and only shows up in disk manager as a

Basic, Online, 2048.00 GB, Healthy (GPT Protective Partition)

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I am running the latest version of Windows 10 Pro x64. I have tried plugging into different USB slots as well as an entirely different PC. BitLocker control panel does not seem to recognize the drive.

Is this some sort of a common BitLocker mounting issue, or is my data lost?

rxj
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  • Afaik, WD Red is a standalone SATA drive and doesn't come with its own USB adapter. What device are you using to connect the disk to USB? Is it exactly the same method as you've used before? Can you do a test with a Linux liveCD? – u1686_grawity Oct 06 '18 at 15:16
  • I'm using an older USB2.0 WD external HDD enclosure. No changes to HW or SW were done. The drive was running fine in this configuration for a couple of weeks, until this happened. What sort of testing do you have in mind? – rxj Oct 06 '18 at 15:21
  • Connect it to an up-to-date system, find your 'sdX' disk device in lsblk, then check whether either sudo fdisk -b 512 -t gpt -l /dev/sdX or sudo fdisk -b 4096 -t gpt -l /dev/sdX shows the expected partitions. – u1686_grawity Oct 06 '18 at 16:06
  • (Backstory: I've seen USB enclosures which for mysterious reasons make a 4kB-sector disk appear as if it had 512B sectors, or the other way around. This distortion prevents the OS from finding the GPT; all they see is the "protective MBR".) – u1686_grawity Oct 06 '18 at 16:12
  • The sector size mismatch seems to be the most probable culprit. Now that I think about it, the problem only started after I filled the drive over the 2TB mark. However, I currently do not have access to a desktop PC to connect it directly to SATA. – rxj Oct 07 '18 at 15:28
  • The amount of space used by files shouldn't be relevant – most filesystems don't fill space linearly; they would have placed data beyond the 2TiB mark much earlier than that. You can do the fdisk test regardless of connection method as the commands explicitly tell fdisk what sector size to assume. – u1686_grawity Oct 07 '18 at 16:42

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The problem was caused by the SATA to USB enclosure I was using and as soon as I connected the HDD to an actual desktop sata port, everything went back to normal.

rxj
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