Windows 7 and a 3TB internal hdd is a bit frustrating, Its ok if you use it in a usb case, but when you try to put it into the pc itself it ____accumulating data, so there i am with 3tb of data that needs to be rescued. Anyone knows a software that could make it pop back into place on the same drive it actually is without having to find another empty 3tb drive to EXPORT it into?your chances of data recovery drop significantly if the drive to be rescued is in use.
that low CHANCE drops even closer to zero if you use the same drive as both source and target.
you are overwriting the very files you are trying to recover with the files just recovered.

and as frustrating as it is, please watch the language - little kiddies may be nearby. 

I think more explanation on this 3TB is in order, like, why do you move it to & from its external caddy?
when you put it into the PC, is it a 'slave'?
what are the BIOS settings for the drives?
does Win7 detect the drive at all?
what's the drives age and SMART data?When companies like Seagate and Western Digital started supplying external drives over 2 Tb they needed to do conversion in the usb to sata adapter to allow the widest compatibility with different windows versions.
Which means once the drive has data it needs to be read with the drive in the en closer. 
So to answer your question, no there is no way to convert a 3tb hard drive from a usb en closer if it is not supported by windows meaning it needs the usb to sata board to do the translation . The only way is to set up another drive under windows as GPT and copy the data.
   
     Source ? ?Patio: 2 second google search but didn't want to post something like this as it WOULD confuse most people.

 http://goughlui.com/2013/10/02/experiment-usb-to-sata-bridge-chips-and-2tb-drives/

Sorry but it does not mean at all that the HDD has to be in it's original enclosure to perform disk level processes in order to get it to work...the "bridge" as he refers to is part of the HDD...not any enclosure.If you don't feel like reading the whole thing the conclusion really says it all.

Thanks very much James for alerting me to this issue that I had subconsciously known of, but hadn't DETERMINED and verified experimentally. This issue is definitely important for anyone with 3Tb or greater external drives – you won’t be able to remove the drive and plug it into a desktop computer and mount it directly. It would be best to bring it to another identical bridge chip just in case other chips have other ideas about how the translation should be done.

I hope this clears this for you Patio. Regards LM


I did read the whole thing...

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This 4K translation CAN be undone. Say your bridge died, you extract the drive and plug it to a native SATA port, and all you can see is a mangled MBR? Well, all you need is to rebuild the MBR to match the proper drive geometry (converting to GPT is a must if the drive is >=2TiB!). This can done with free tools like Testdisk – I wrote a forum post about that: http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=1832 – and yes, the filesystem does not seem to care about the underlying block size, hence that’s why I was able to mount it with no data loss/corruption. All you need to do is to look for lost partitions and rebuild the MBR/GPT accordingly. *censored*, you should be able to do so if you plug your drive to a 4K-translating bridge too!
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