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

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

The topic was discussed before but without any solution.

I’m in the same situation: only 800GB of 3TB are detected by Windows XP and the Acronis WD Alignment tool.

I don’t want to use the HD in the system but in an external USB connected enclosure.

How can I use the full capacity?

Shine On, Frank

2

You need a 64bit OS 

Windows XP 32 bits does not support drives larger than 2TB

You can take a look at the trick provided on this Link and see if it helps 

3

WD’s external 3TB drives are compatible with Windows XP straight out of the box. The way that WD circumvents the 2TiB limit is by configuring the USB-SATA bridge firmware to present the mass storage device as having 4KB logical sectors instead of 512-byte LBAs. This effectively increases the capacity limit to 16GiB. The trick is to find an enclosure that is set up for 4KB LBAs.

Wizer’s solution sounds like the easier option, but you need to be certain that your enclosure can see more than 2TiB. Older enclosures may have a 32-bit limit which means that 2TiB will be the maximum capacity when using 512-byte logical sectors.