I plugged in a 8TB GPT HDD in my pc via external usb adapter (see Footnote 1 for adapters). Then I safely removed and physically unplugged the adapter from the PC, turned off the PC. Next day I plugged the adapter in again with a 2TB HDD, and it's mistakenly shown as larger: with the correct 1863.01GB partition, and 2 fake unallocated space partitions:
Is the windows partitoning scheme wrongly intertwined across Disks now? The Disk name in the screenshow is (wrongly) the name of the 8TB disk (but I don't have any "184.98" and "5404.04" partitions) but the name of the 1863.01 partition is that of the 2TB disk, which works "correctly".
What exactly is breaking here, and how can I fix this, and how could I prevent this? (while still being able to use usb with my old HDDs - "ditch sata & usb, get a new pc with m.2s" is not the range of answers I'm looking for 😊)
At the risk of murking this question up, I've also had trouble sometimes when connecting these/similar drives via internal SATA (after they had "malfunctioned" this way via usb adapters) and windows still showed them as RAW / unallocated. Then plugged them back into a usb adapter, and they worked (And files were there etc).
So what I at least want to understand is why is Windows getting confused?
PS: This happened in windows 7, 10, and 11...
Footnote 1: I have and use at least 4 different usb adapters or docks from 4 different brands, all claim to support GPT / 8TB drives etc.
This sort of hdd dock actually gave me a scarier problem: I had hdds A B C D. I then swapped to something like E B D C -- and now D was showing as C with half of D's content and C was showing as being part of D. Never using one of these again with more than 1 disks inside 🙂
![enter image description here]()
This sort of usb hdd adapter, which is what I used in the issue I described in the question. In this case I did use the same adapter both times, and possibly in the same usb port.
![enter image description here]()
usb hdd caddy -- never used caddies
