WD Red 4Tb only shows 2794GB after running Lifeguard

So i have 4 4TB reds in a synology nas, one tripped with bad sectors. I plugged it into my Win 10 machine and importantly it recognized it at this point as a 4tb drive.

Tried to run the Lifeguard app [with no attached usb storage] and the stupid thing crashes after the license screen everytime. I have an old XP machine so i plugged it into that and installed Lifeguard and great.

Ran the extended test and came up with some bad sectors but was able to fix. Second extended test came back clean. Plugged back into my main machine and removed all the old partitions and plugged it back into the nas.

Now i wasn’t looking too hard here as i wasn’t expected anything bizarre but either when removeing the partitions or elsewhere the drive is now reporting as only having a capacity of 2794.42GB in either the NAS or WIn 10.

So go back to lifeguard on teh old XP machien and it only shows as 3000GB.

What happened?

The drive is GPT all space is unallocated [2794.42GB] there is no other free space available in Disk Mgmt, converting from GPT to MBR and back just spits it into a 2tb and 700GB partition.

What happened to the other 1tb of space? there should be at least 3.7tb on there?1?

Hello,

Sounds like the XP capacity limitation.

Check on disk management and you should be able to see the rest of the unit unallocated.

Indeed! And i did check that but it’d cap at 2.2TB if it was MBR, and that wouldn’t have presented when i put it back in the Win10 machine.

Turns out it was this: The HDD Oracle. • View topic - GigaByte BIOS bug results in loss of 1TB capacity which was pointed out on another board.

When i put the drive in the old XP machine i inadvertently used the main boot drive cables, booted, realized my mistake and switched out a data drive. That was enough for the BIOS on the Gigabyte mobo to do its damage.

I used the Atola tool here: Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity

To reset it back to full capacity and get rid of the HPA partition.

Anyways thanks for the help and hopefully this’ll help out the next person.

I should note that Lifeguard not working in Windows 10 was entirely the start of this needless 3 day waste of time. A major support tool like that should be kept current…i’m looking at you Western Digital!