4T Drive only showing 1.7T

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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Bought a WD Performance 4Tb (Model WDBSLA0040HNC-NRSN), and have installed it in my Dell XPS desktop.

When I look via F2 setup, it shows the 4T drive, also in the Intel RST it sows the drive as 3.7T…

However in Windows 7, it shows as 1.7T.  I went to disk management, but again only lets me configure ads 1.7T.

Where else should I be looking for a solution?

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THe drive will need to be formatted with the GPT filesystem, not NTFS. Is the OS on this disk or is it a secondary disk?

1 Like
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It is the secondary disk…

I selected GPT when I setup the drive.  But NTFS shows up when I format the drive…

How do I get back to the step where I select GPT?

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Is your Win 7 32 bit, or 64 bit? I’m not sure that this is relevant for a secondary disk. Booting GPT requires 64 bit

MBR partitions are limited to 2 TB. Both MBR and GPT can have NTFS formatting, but GPT size limits are much higher.

EDIT: Oops. Forgot to say- if Disk Management is only showing that much, check it in the WINDLG utility. I really expect that to show the size correctly. If it does not, and there is nothing unique/important on the drive, you could try doing the fast “Write Zeroes” wipe on the drive. This returns it to a complete “Unallocated” state.

Really, though, if the BIOS sees the drive correctly, but not even WINDLG sees it correctly under Windows, I would contact Support directly. There are a variety of options listed here:

http://support.wdc.com/contact/

    • *> FROM Wikipedia: > Maximum volume size> In theory, the maximum NTFS volume size is 264−1 clusters. However, the maximum NTFS volume size as implemented in Windows XP Professional is 232−1 clusters partly due to partition table limitations. For example, using 64 kB clusters, the maximum Windows XP NTFS volume size is 256 TBs minus 64 KBs. Using the default cluster size of 4 kB, the maximum NTFS volume size is 16 TB minus 4 kB. (Both of these are vastly higher than the 128 GB limit lifted in Windows XP SP1.) Because partition tables on master boot record (MBR) disks only support partition sizes up to 2 TB, dynamic or GPT volumes must be used to create NTFS volumes over 2 TB. Booting from a GPT volume to a Windows environment requires a system with UEFI and 64-bit support. [68]> * * *
      interfx wrote:

It is the secondary disk…

 

I selected GPT when I setup the drive.  But NTFS shows up when I format the drive…

 

How do I get back to the step where I select GPT?

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interfx I think I set you a bit wrong, GPT is not a filesystem. GPT can be used instead of the MBR file system, and then you still format the GPT partition as NTFS. It sounds like you’ve done this so I’d not sure what your problem might be.