04-22-2016
I have a 1TB WD drive which I cloned successfully from my Dell PC using Casper and Sabrent model DSC5 USB interface. The clone was successful in every way with all files contained on the clone.
Yesterday I received my two Plugable USB3-Sata-USAP1 docking stations. I set up
the WD clone in one of the Plugable stations today. (I only opened one of the two stations). The new plugable station does not recognize the files on my clone but treats the drive as empty needing to be formatted. I double checked by reconnecting it to my USB Sabrent and the PC recognized it as my clone previously copied with all its files. Please advise as I am now thinking about returning the two plugables to Amazon.
Thanks,
Paul A. Buechler, paul@buechler.com
Hello Paul,
Likely this issue is caused because the Sabrent dock is using what is called “Sector Emulation” to format and write to the drive. Our docking stations do not use any kind of emulation and will not be able to read data from a dock that does.
Sector emulation was useful when Windows XP was around as emulation allowed some behind the scenes trickery to allow larger than 2TB drives on a 32bit OS. Now days with modern operating systems that is no longer needed and usually causes more problems.
We have a good article on this here: http://plugable.com/2015/03/12/recove…
Scroll down to “External Hard Drives” and there is a section on sector emulation.
Thank you.