HDD Problems

i had 3 external Hdd's

1TB Seagate (usb 2)

1TB Hitachi (usb 2)

3TB Seagate (usb 3)

i built a new pc so i cracked them all open. and put them in my case connected them with sata cables.

pc works fine os is on a 250gb ssd. im just looking to use these hdds as additional storage without raid 

the 1TB Seagate works fine.

The 1 TB Hitachi some how turns the Hdmi display port  off when i boot and shows no signal (only with power sata cable in maybe a doggy power connection maybe the 6gb/s connector has no effect in or out). the data on here can be wiped if necessary. 

The 3TB Seagate Shows but says needs formatting but when put back into the old external casing works fine its NTFS. is there anyway i can get this to show correctly with data intact? i would transfer the data and format but i don't have enough space unless i buy another hdd which id rather not do. 

any help would be appreciated.

With the 1 TB Hitachi, have you tried plugging it in on a different SATA port? I can't think of why the HDD would ever influence the HDMI port, other than a problem with the motherboard.

As for the 3TB Seagate, does that drive have all the Seagate "Tools" that come with it? If the drive had never been formatted previously, my guess would be that those are interfering and that's why the OS says it needs to be formatted. If it has been formatted in the past, I don't have any ideas off the top of my head.

he Hitachi i reformatted in windows and seems to work now (through usb)

the segate one i reformatted ( through sata port) and now its shows up as 367GB???? even know i know its 3TB

any ideas what went wrong?

Without seeing the reformat process and what it looks like in the drive manager now, I don't really know. I would try to reformat it again, and make sure that it is an NTFS format and that you don't have any partitions.

Could you recommend any free software that can do better formatting than ms os 8.1 ? 

thanks for the reply's 

I don't really have any experience with formatting software; I've always had luck with the Windows :/ I'm sure if you google formatting software review you'll be able to find something of merit.

Now that you mention Windows 8.1, I guess it might be possible that your drivers are either not up to date or they're not optimized for Windows 8. Is there any way that you could get Windows 7 on the system to see if you keep having issues?

Hey you were right! it was a problem with windows 8 ( i think). downloaded software it didnt work but then opened up disk system management ( which is extremely hard to find in win 8) found two partitions still couldn't configure them so changed them to GTP ( or something) instead of MBR, and it works fine and shows up as 2.72TB. works fine now thanks for helping.

Heres an online quote if anyone is interested:

In most cases, you will be fine with either MBR or GPT. It is only in situation where you need to install Windows on a Mac, or when you need to have a partition bigger than 2TB, that you need to use GPT, or convert MBR to GPT. Also, for the newer model of computer that uses UEFI, it will only support GPT. (my problem i think)

Nice! I'm glad you got it figured out. The UEFI vs BIOS thing has come up a few times in my experiences now. Hopefully you don't run into any more issues.