Brand New WD Caviar 3TB drive appears as 0MB in both IDE and AHCI Mode within the BIOS. I have 2 Desktop Systems one in Windows 7 the other in Windows 8.1 and they cannot detect the drive from Disk Management.
Hello,
Do you have this drive plugged in directly to your motherboard or are you using an external enclosure?
Yes it is directly connected.
I have the same issue. I’m installing this same drive on a WHS2011. The drive is not recognized. To make sure the drive was working I installed it externally on my Windows 7 machine and was able to get it to work. Unfortunately the drive was only able to be formatted at 764gb. But that’s not my concern yet as i need it to run on my windows home server. I’ve never had a problem with WD drives before although this is my first green drive.
Did you check with the system manufacturer to verify that your system can use a 3 TB drive? You’re system BIOS needs to be able to support the drive capacity for it to show up properly in the BIOS. I would also see if there is a BIOS update for your system/motherboard. If you are trying to use it as a boot drive, your motherboard has to UEFI and have the ability to boot from a drive over 2 TB. These are all system limitations and not a limitation of the drive.
I’ve also come across some system that disable SATA ports by default so if you are adding the drive as a secondary unit, make sure that the SATA port it is connected to is enabled.
NicJohn wrote:
I have the same issue. I’m installing this same drive on a WHS2011. The drive is not recognized. To make sure the drive was working I installed it externally on my Windows 7 machine and was able to get it to work. Unfortunately the drive was only able to be formatted at 764gb. But that’s not my concern yet as i need it to run on my windows home server. I’ve never had a problem with WD drives before although this is my first green drive.
NicJohn, WHS 2011 can support drives up to 3 TB but it still has the VHD image limitation of 2 TB. Usually WHS will split a 3 TB drive into two partitions. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the OS and not the drive. I would also make sure that you have the latest Windows updates for WHS since Microsoft has released several fixes to help with large capacity drive limitations. If you would like some additional info, I found the following lnk tha talks about this limitation:
