Re-using old hard drives in new enclosures

Factual Questions
1

Over the past few years, I have pulled three 2.5" drives from old laptops and put them into new enclosures designed to make them portable. No problem - just snap into the case and attach to USB on computer. I also liberated a 3.5" drive from its enclosure and put it into a media player with great results.

I decided to do a couple recently. I had three Sata 2.5" drives and ordered Sata enclosures for them. None of the three drives works correctly in either of the enclosures. They all start spinning and the light comes on, but sometimes the computer fails to recognize a hdd is attached, even though it says the driver is installed. Other times, the drive is recognized with a volume label of SERVICEV002 and a capacity of 3.24 gigs, but this is a 80 gig drive!

All drives and cases came from different sources. What could be wrong?

2

External drives often have proprietary software installed in a separate partition that performs backup, monitoring, recovery or RAID functions. Some manufacturers like Dell do something similar with their internal drives from the factory. Those installations can sometimes shield the larger partition when used in another capacity.

I have a Western Digital external drive that I removed from its original case and have never been able to delete a partition that held WD software. It’s zero bytes, but shows as a separate drive. I think I later found a download on their site that would have deleted it, but it didn’t work because I had already tried other means to reformat and erase it.