So as the title says I have a 4TB drive I want to add as a secondary drive in my PC. I will not be booting off this drive. It is new, and not formatted in any way.
I’m running Windows 7 Pro 64bit SP1 and in Disk Management the disk only shows up as 1.6TB. I’ve converted it to GPT but it still only shows the one partition that is too small.
I was hoping you guys could give me an idea where the limitation is coming from (i.e motherboard, OS, BIOS) or possibly show me where on the website I can find the appropriate WD drivers/software to get this working as I can’t seem to find anything
PC: HP Pavilion p6210uk Desktop
Motherboard: PEGATRON Narra6 Nvidia MCP61
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 5.15 (06/11/2009)
HDD: WD Green 4TB Desktop 3.5 inch Internal SATA Hard Drive
Unfortunately the HP website doesn’t seem to list an update for this BIOS so I’m kinda stumped just now.
I’m currently thinking it is the BIOS that was the issue, but before I went crazy searching for an update (which I’m not sure exists tbh) and trying random ones, I threw it into a newer PC with a newer motherboard/bios and running Win10, formatted it there and it works in Win7 on the older PC. The BIOS still reports it as being 1800GB which does imply the BIOS is the bottleneck, but it works in Windows so happy days
[quote=“trouserboycott, post:3, topic:136769, full:true”]
I threw it into a newer PC with a newer motherboard/bios and running Win10, formatted it there and it works in Win7 on the older PC. The BIOS still reports it as being 1800GB which does imply the BIOS is the bottleneck, but it works in Windows so happy days[/quote]No, no, no. That’s not the solution. This is your personal disaster in the future. You will loose all your data! Once accessed by writing above the 2TB mark to the hard drive, all data will be deleted.
Windows does not use the BIOS for disk access. It uses device drivers. Therefore, it does not matter with what capacity the BIOS detects a hard drive. Even if the BIOS disk capacity does not recognize correctly, they would still be recognized correctly under Windows. If this is not the case, the device driver is out of date and has a 32-bit LBA limit.
If the hard drive set up in another computer without 32-bit LBA limit and then reinstalled in the original computer, the disaster takes its course. Windows relies on the information that has been written to the partition table, and not also checks the actual available capacity.
But the fact remains, that through the limitation of the controller driver, is only the first 2 TiB of the hard drive useable for Windows.
You have either to update the proprietary SATA controller driver or switch to the default Microsoft driver (msahci, if you run the SATA-Controller in AHCI mode).
Does this default driver of win 7 (standard AHCI 1.0 Sata Controller) year 2006 support LBA 48 bit ( means no 32 bit limitation) and possible to use with 6 TB disk without any problem?
Madnex, thanks for your help, you were very right.
NVidia provide the chipset for this machine and so have their own “nforce” sata controller drivers. It would seem these aren’t supported anymore and can’t really be updated. A guy even creates his own but none of these seemed to work.
For any googlers:
The solution was to right click the “NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller” in Device Manager for the data hard drive with the issue (if you do this to your OS drive your PC won’t boot - if they’re both under one driver consider switching the hard drive to a different SATA port) and select Update Driver. Then select a driver locally from the computer and choose the “standard dual channel PCI IDE controller”. Reboot. That should hopefully do it.
