Caviar Green 3 TB drive in Windows XP, recognizes only 800 GB

I just bought a 3 TB caviar green internal drive.  The motherboard bios sees it as a 3000GB drive, no problem.  Windows sees only 800GB.  What can I do to fix this?

why do you bought  3TB for such an old system ? :confused:

i think windows xp doesnt support more than  2.2 TB with one partition

lets wait for more anwsers, maybe im wrong

I can’t get xp to see that the physical drive is larger than 800gb.  I would be happy if I could partition the drive into a pair of 1.5 tb logical drives.

32 bit XP does not support drives larger than 2T. There is a format tool for external drives that make the larger drives work on XP. I don’t know if they have something similar for the internal drives. See if this helps http://hothardware.com/Articles/WDs-1TB-Caviar-Green-w-Advanced-Format-Windows-XP-Users-Pay-Attention/  or this on  advanced format tab http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=120

Joe

Yes, but…Why can’t I partition the physical drive into two smaller logical drives.  Or for that matter three 1TB partitions!  My problem is that I can’t get windows to “see” all that extra space and create those extended partitions.

i think you will have to go to a friends house and see if they can do it with vista or seven

A great guy that posts here fzabkar sent me a PM with a couple of links that might help I’ll paste it in

I am aware of two ways in which other HDD manufacturers circumvent the 2TiB limit of Windows XP.

Seagate uses DiscWizard, an OEM version of Acronis Disk Director, to emulate two physical drives, 2TB plus   http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/storage-peripherals

/2011/04/18/seagate-barracuda-xt-3tb-sata-6gbps-40092544/ (For some reason this link doesn’t work if you click on it but does if you copy and paste it in browser)

Hitachi gets around the problem with a GPT Disk Manager:
http://www.paragon-software.com/hitachi/

The trouble is you are adding hardware that didn’t exist when XP came out. You might also search for a third party format tool that runs from CD to format it for XP.

Joe

Windows XP 32-bit doesn’t support hard drives greater than 2.17TB.  But more importantly, it’s almost certain that your BIOS and SATA controller don’t support larger drives as well.

You get get a compatible HBA (host bus adapter) that might allow you to partition some of the drive, but the MBR partition scheme can only address 2.17TB and Windows XP 32-bit will refuse to recognize GPT-partitioned drives.  In addition, your BIOS probably can’t boot a > 2.17TB drive.  Usually UEFI motherboards are required for that.

The best thing about computers is that nothing’s impossible, and there are certainly ways to work around the issue you’re facing, but you are looking at an uphill battle here.

You’re better off with Windows Vista, 7, or Linux if you want to use an internal drive larger than 2.17TB, but Windows XP 64-bit edition is the oldest version that’s designed for these larger drives.