Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Matthams]

Hi all

I recently got 2 of the Seagate SATA 3TB drives> However when I connected them to my pc and checked the drives in disk managment 1 was showing up as 2.7 TB (as expected) but the other was only 1.8TB. I have done nothing to the drives so far except to plug them in and look at them in disk managment. Does anyone know if there is anything I can do to claim back the missing space or should I just return the drive and get a new one?

Thanks in advance

Dan

[Cantbecanit]

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/Resources-to-overcome-the-2-TB-limitat...

[Matthams]

I think you misunderstand me. Im not having an issue with a partition its the unpartioned total disk size that is showing up as 1.8TB on one disk and 2.7TB on the other.

[Cantbecanit]

Unless you have a EFi bios you must use Discwizard V13 to allocate the remaining portion of the drive, anyway you couldn't have read all the info I linked you in the 10 minutes since, so please have a full read and I think you will find the answer you seek, only other thing I can think of is your board for some silly reason won't support 2, 3TB drives at once, unlikely though, and can you list your hardware I can't keep guessing why without any clues as to what the weather looks like outside,

[Matthams]

I dead the information you sugested last night before posting on here. I also came across this page.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/beyond-2tb/

That states that windows 7 supports these drives when using them as data drives. Are you now telling me that this information is wrong and that windows 7 does not support these drives as data disks and i need to use Diskwizard? I assumed that 1 of them was faulty because of the 2 differant sizes disk managment was showing.

Speaking of not reading if you had read my original post you whould have seen that I said I have done nothing to these drive apart from connecting them and looking at the sizes in disk managment I have not yet tried to set up any kind of partition on the drives.

mysystem is

Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Socket 775. 

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory 

Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB Solid State Drive (boot drive)

2x Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 32MB (these drives will be replaced with the 2 i recently got)

2x Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB

I will try connecting the drives one at a time but I have my doubts that this is the cause of the issue.

[Cantbecanit]

No, I said old bios' don't fully support these drives, there is now a bios called UEFi that allows the bios to recognise the full capacity of larger than 2TB drives, if you don't have that bios, which I know you don't because iirc no 775 board does you will need to use Diswizard to add the missing portion as an additional drive, normally it's a 2TB and 746GB split.

[Cantbecanit]

Follow this

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/3TB-Cuda-XT-Install-Procedure-Progress...

Make sure you have the all the correct drivers loaded to the C drive, i.e if you are Intel which you are you need the V10 RST driver.

[Matthams]

You are still missing my point. I know that BIOS will notfully support these drives.

Lets look at this from another point of view. You are saying that windows 7 will not detect this drive as it is over 2TB and that is why one of my drives is showing in disk managmnt as 1.8TB unallocated space. so why is the second disk being shown as 2.7TB unallocated space?

[Cantbecanit]

I can't answer that 100%, I can tell you that I have had mine show up as a full 2.7 before also, if you follow what I did this should resolve, add the Intel RST drivers to your C drive, the SSD one, and then format the two 3TB ones and then set them up in Discwizard V13 it must be V13 and it must be on your C drive, use the  function for Extended Capacity Disc's, you should have two 2TB drives and then 2 746GB drives showing, so in effect 4 slave drives to the SSD drive.

Or another way to put it, they aren't simply PnP, you have to configure them.

[Cantbecanit]

Above answer is edited so read it through again if you haven't already.

[fzabkar]

Matthams, are the drives detected in BIOS with their correct capacity?

If not, then be aware that Gigabyte's Xpress Recovery BIOS has a bug that incorrectly truncates a drive after backing up a copy of itself at the end of the drive. This bug causes 1TB of capacity to be lost.

The solution is a simple one, but could we first see how a disc utility such as SeaTools or HD Sentinel reports the drive's capacity?

[Matthams · Accepted solution]

Right I finally cracked this. I reconnected the 2 drives and would you believe it its showed up as the right capacity! I then converted the 2 disks to use MBR rather than GPT and this created the 2 partitions on the drive (a 2TB partition and a 746GB) I Put some random test data on all 4 of the partitions and was able to access the data from a XP machine!

Im not sure why one of the drives did not initially show the full capacity but I got there in the end. It seems that these disks are PnP under windows 7 for data use at least but you just have to watch out for what partition they initially have (out of the boxes 1 was set for MBR and the other for GPT!)

[Cantbecanit]

Nothing I said to you helped then?

[fzabkar]

Your symptoms, and "fix", are consistent with a bug in GigaByte's BIOS. For some versions of the BIOS, you can only restore the full native capacity using an application such as HDAT2, HDD Capacity Restore Tool, or SeaTools for DOS (Set Capacity command). Other BIOS versions appear to be self-correcting. In the latter case the BIOS will automatically re-examine each drive if the boot order changes. ISTM that your problem drive may have at one time been first in the boot order. That's when the BIOS would have truncated it.

It would have helped immensely if you had clarified whether the drive's capacity was misreported in BIOS. This would have confirmed whether you were seeing a hardware or BIOS issue rather than an OS problem. You could still confirm this by using a disc editor to search the drive for BIOS related text strings. The BIOS normally writes about 2000 sectors at the end of the drive. If these are within your user area, then there exists an opportunity for insidious file system corruption. If you would like to scan your drive, and if you need help to do this, please let us know.

BTW, internal drives are shipped blank, ie they have no partitions out-of-the-box. So the MBR versus GPT question should not arise. However, Seagate's external 3TB GoFlex drives are shipped with an MBR partition and NTFS file system. These are specified to work on Windows XP straight out-of-the-box. The way that Seagate circumvents the apparent 2TiB MBR limitation is by having the USB-SATA bridge IC report that the drive has 4KB LBAs rather than the usual 512-bytes. The bridge IC then handles the 512B-to-4KB translation when communicating with the drive.

BTW, I would be most grateful if you could allow us to see your partition table and boot sectors on your Windows XP machine. This would be very illuminating. You could do this with Microsoft's Sector Inspector:

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

If you extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file, the procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.