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Need help with regaining full capacity

N

nanotechy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2009
Messages
257
Hello,

I recently purchased the 3TB Seagate External USB 3.0 drive from Staples. Took the hdd out, put in an Antec MX-1 external enclosure, was asked to format drive, went ahead with request, but options in formating windows only show 1 for 349G "capacity". This doesn't sound right. So posted a follow up post in the Hotdeal forum http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1750195&page=2

Got some help, but still can't gain the full capacity of the drive, only 746.39GB.

Thanks to BoogerBomb, I followed the steps he provided below till step 3, but still only give me 74.39GB.
1. Now, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management. Choose Disk Management on the left and you should see in the lower portion of the screen a list of your installed drives. The larger drive should appear in the list with a capacity displaying on the left. Note, a 3TB drive will only have a storage capacity of LOWER than 3TB (read: when you add formatting and a file system, both of those require space on the drive, so you will not have a full 3TB of space to use-this is the nature of hard drives-you will never have the full stated capacity-ever since it is required to make the drive useable).

2. Now, assuming you're using it as a data storage drive, ensure that nothing is still stored on it and right click on the partition on the right, right click the partition (if there is one on the drive already) and click "Delete Volume".

3. Next, right click on the name on the left "Disk #" and choose "Convert to GPT Disk". Now this should allow you to right click on the unformatted space on the right and to create a new partition which can hold the full available capacity of your drive.

This should work with all versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 (with the only exception being a starter edition *may not*).

With the variety of systems now sold using UEFI instead of BIOS, you can today on those systems install Windows directly onto a drive greater than 2.19TB in size. Just ensure that your computer actually is using it before attempting to run Windows on a drive that large. It's also probably not a great idea just due to the fact that if Windows fails you will likely lose all the data on that partition.
Click to expand...

Again, after performing step three above, I still can't see the full capacity of my drive. I might have missed something, but I can't see what it is. Now, when right click, I don't even see "Format" option anymore. What else can I do? What else must I do to gain the full capacity of this drive?

My system this MX-1 enclosure is running on:
OS: Windows 7
Lenovo X220 Tablet
RAM: 4GB

Thanks in advance.
 
Based upon the newegg info for your Antec MX-1 it states support for up to 2TB. I would suggest putting the drive either into your computer or back into the original ext case and see if that allows you to see the whole drive. I'm think that the enclosure is limited to the 2TB size and doesn't know how to read the drive correctly.

Also as a side note what Windows reports as the size of the hdd is in base 2 but the hdd manufacturer states is base 10. Essentially you have 3,000,000,000,000 bytes of usable space according to the manufacturer. If you take that number and divide by 1024 4 times you will get ~2.73TB of space according to Windows.
 
Thanks, bbenz33 and Old Hippie,

Good point, bbenz33. Though I should've have paid closer attention to that, I previously installed larger drives in advertised support capacity; so I automatically assumed this one would be the same. Maybe not the case.

Now placing the hd back into original enclosure, shows 2794GB unallocated, but as an unknow disk and Not Initialized. Perhaps because I deleted the original partition.

@ Old Hippie, it's 64bit Windows 7. Hopefully, there's a go around to this, because I really need the help of the active cooling capabaility of the MX-1 enclosure.
 
because I really need the help of the active cooling capabaility of the MX-1 enclosure.
Click to expand...
Nice enclosure!

Hopefully you'll get this figured out.

Good Luck!
 
Yes, I really like the MX-1 enclosure. Too bad they don't make them any more. Do you know of one equivalent to it that is currently being made and supports drives larger than 2TB/

So, I guess even the 64bit Windows won't provide a work around or make a difference then?
 
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If the block device itself is that size your screwed. As someone mentioned its basically resetting at the 2 TiB point (2199 GB using HD companies scale) and the 801 GB left over is the 747 GiB that shows up.

I know a lot of times enclosures and stuff will support more than what they say but the problem is > 2 TiB is a big change just like > 128 GiB was back in the days where it not as simple as just being a 'larger' drive. Back in the day the 128 GiB (or 137 GB as it is commonly known in decimal HD companies scale) limit was the limit of lba32. With lba48 that limit went up to 2048 GiB (2200 GB decimal HD company scale). For > 2048 GiB (2 TiB) you need lba64 support which is likely the enclosure does not have.
 
I seem to remember at least one poster who used that enclosure seeing the whole drive, and ending up with the dreaded wrapped data issue screwing everything.
 
So, I guess even the 64bit Windows won't provide a work around or make a difference then?
Click to expand...
IF the MX-1 can read a larger disk size then 2tb you may be helped by updating the BIOS from here or here and updating the chipset drivers.
 
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