I recently purchased 2 WD30EZRX 3TB drives. I’ve installed one of them but I’m having an issue with the second.
I ended up doing a fresh install of WIndows 7, so I decided to work with just 1 of the drives at first. Of course, at the time I didn’t know that I couldn’t boot off of this drive and use the full 3TB with my BIOS so I had to move the boot volume to a 500GB drive I still had installed. After I did that, I was able to convert the 3TB from MBR to GPT and I was able to make 2 partitions to use up all the drive.
Tonight I installed the 2nd 3TB drive only to discover that, even after initializing it as GPT in Disk Management, it appears to recognize it only as a 2TB (1862.91GB). It shows my other as 3TB no problem. I tried making a partition, thinking it might then see the rest after doing that, but it didn’t change anything. I remember having the problem with the first one where, once Windows was installed on it, it showed a 745GB unallocated chunk which I couldn’t use, but for this 2nd drive it’s only showing the 1 single block. Any ideas as to what the cause of this might be and what I could do to fix it?
Your system may have a limitation regarding the maximum hard drive capacity supported. I suggest you to contact your system manufacturer to verify the compatibility of the drives. WD also has a PCI SATA controller card that bypass this limitation, you may contact WD Support to ask for it.
I would download dlg diagnostics from wd and write zeros to the second drive. then I would try repartitioning and formatting it as gpt. see if that does it.
It doesn’t appear that your capacity problem is a 2 TiB limitation issue. Instead, could it be that you have a Gigabyte motherboard with an Xpress Recovery BIOS? If so, then be aware that some BIOS versions have a bug that reduces the capacity of a HDD by 1TB.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. Here’s an update of where things are at present:
So far, I’ve tried switching the SATA channel it was on (from 4-5 to 0-1). Since one of the drives works fine, I also tried disconnecting that one and leaving the other hooked up. I’ve tried going back and forth between MBR and GPT. One thing I noticed doing that is that Windows reported the space a little differently, with GPT being about 1 MB less than MBR. I’ve also tried de-initializing it with diskpart and then re-initializing as GPT. None of this has had any effect. It’s still showing up as a 2TB drive.
To answer a previous question, I do happen to have a Gigabyte motherboard, the P35-DS3L (though I’m not sure which Rev at the moment). I have seen a BIOS update on their site which addresses a hard drive size problem, though from the description it sounded like it affects 1TB drives rather than affecting the size by 1TB. It also doesn’t seem to explain the fact that the other 3TB drive is working fine.
I’ve downloaded DLG as well as HDT (I think that’s what it was called), and I’m trying the write zeroes method now. DLG also reports the disk as 2000GB. If neither of these works, the last thing I’m going to try is a PCI-e SATA controller card. If that doesn’t work then I think the drive itself may be a bit of a dud, in which case I’ll have to RMA or return it.
The reason that DLG can only see 2TB is because the drive is reporting a capacity of 2TB via the ATA Identify Device command. This confirms that BIOS (or some other application) has truncated the drive. The reason that your other 3TB HDD remains unaffected by the bug is that BIOS will only touch the drive that is highest in the boot order. This means that your problem drive must have been promoted to the top of the boot order at one time.
As for Gigabyte’s BIOS update changelog, either Gigabyte doesn’t understand the problem, or it is carefully choosing its language in an attempt to disguise the real problem. In fact I have encountered this bug so often that I’m surprised that there has been no [edited].
Please humour me and use HDAT2 or the HDD Capacity Restore Tool to restore the full native capacity of your drive. If you RMA your drive, then BIOS will only do the same thing to your replacement. In fact if you promote your other 3TB drive to the top of the boot order, then BIOS will trash it as well. Try it if you dare.
Well, after a not-so-fun week, I was able to resolve the issue and get the drive back to 3TB. I want to thank you guys for your help. If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be waiting for a replacement drive right now. Regarding the BIOS updates, let’s just say that Gigabyte’s English isn’t the greatest so the descriptions of the updates are probably not entirely accurate
For those who might be in a similar situation, here’s how I fixed the issue:
fzabkar was quite right that my drive had been truncated. It probably was the BIOS of my Gigabyte board (P35-DS3L), even though I’m 99% sure that this particular drive had never been at the top of the boot order. Regardless, I’ve tried all kinds of things. I wanted to try HDD Capacity Restore, but it doesn’t run on 64 bit operating systems and I didn’t have a 32-bit system handy, so that was out. I also tried to use HDAT2, but I couldn’t get the boot CD to work so that was out. After some Googling I learned about Parted Magic. Well that’s Linux and I’m a Windows man so that was a little beyond me and I abandoned it. It very well could’ve done the trick as well, but it wasn’t my cup of tea so I decided not to press my luck. After that, I read about MHDD. Through reading about MHDD I discovered Ultimate Boot CD, which happened to include this utility. So I downloaded that and ran MHDD but it always said my drives weren’t ready. Gave up on that and noticed that HDAT2 was also included so I tried that. Well that disabled my keyboard (which could’ve been an error on my part), so THAT was out. In browsing the list of diagnostic utilities I spied SeaTools (2 versions, 1 with a GUI). I remembered that so I ran it. It was extremely easy to use. I selected the drive and it showed me how it was indeed truncated, so then I went into one of the menus and selected reset to max factory capacity. 10 seconds later it was done. I rebooted into Windows, loaded Disk Management, and there was my drive, all shiny and new with 3TB. I converted it to GPT and I’ve partitioned and formatted it and all is well. To prevent this from happening again (I hope), I’ve also updated my BIOS to address this particular bug.
Hopefully my journey will help others. If you’re running a 64-bit OS and don’t have access to XP or another 32-bit OS for HDD Capacity Restore, give Ultimate Boot CD a try. As a semi-last resort I was going to format my Shuttle PC and put XP on it to fix the drive. Thankfully I didn’t get quite that desparate.
I have the same problem, my new WD green 3tb only reads 746 GB and using MHDD 4.6 from Hiren Boot CD sadly doesn’t work for me. Neither does HDAT2 or SeaToolsfor dos 1.09. It won’t reveal my WD hdd, but just the laptops master drive: Hitachi hdd. Btw the 3TB is hooked up on a usb 2.0 enclosure to the laptops usb port. System is win xp pro sp2, amd arthlon 64bit, dual core processor TK-53. Any have any suggestions?
Edit: I tried the same on a gateway nv55c laptop (win7 x64) but less successful. Failed on loading drivers e.g gcdrom.sys, vide-cdd.sys, Tshcddrv.sys etc. & this error msg: !! BootCD files were not found.!!
My next attempt is burn a Ultimate Boot CD and/or try HDD Capacity Restore Tool.
I also tried the DLG thing as well. Had to put in my old 120gb drive, install windows on that and then format the 3tb drive. Then I changed the boot order so I can install win7 on the 3tb drive. After doing that I could only use 2tb’s. On the cd that came with my motherboard, there’s a utility that will unlock the 2tb limit. I have a asus board. A few clicks of the mouse and the problem was solved. I also thought that I might have to update the bios, but the tech people at some big name store said the bios wouldn’t matter. Come to find out that you can flash the bios and unlock the limit as well.
I fresh install on my old drive, 7+ hours to format my new drive, another fresh install on the new drive could have been solved with a few clicks of the mouse.
In the end, check the cd your mother board comes with as well see if the bios needs to be flashed with save you a lot of head aches.
