Installed 3Tb HD Showing as 745Gb

Legless · 29 Nov 2011 at 17:03

Just installed a new WD 3Tb HD for storage on my pc, and when setting it up in windows 7, its only showing as 746Gb, can anyone please help me...

drakioned · 29 Nov 2011 at 17:31

Couple of questions:

1) Is this a boot or secondary drive?
2) What motherboard do you have, does it support UEFI?
3) 32 or 64bit Windows 7?
4) What's the detected capacity in the BIOS? (if your BIOS has such a thing)

Legless · 29 Nov 2011 at 17:47

The drive is a secondary drive, System specs are in my signature, as far as i know the board doesn't support, UEFI, I'm using Windows 7 64Bit, and in the bios it says the drive is 800Gb.

hominid · 29 Nov 2011 at 17:57

Windows can only see what the bios tells it, you need a bios update for the motherboard I think.

Ginger-Menace · 29 Nov 2011 at 17:59

you could try it on a different sata port, but does sound like u need a newer bios that will allow 3tb drives

Essexraptor · 29 Nov 2011 at 18:45

no "offical" Bios update for that MB since 2009 so you'll be hard pushed to fix your problem that way

have a look at this article here and you may see the depth of your problems

http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3tb_hard_drives.html

If you have no data on the drive and some time to spare .. it may be worth having a stab at formatting the drive as GPT instead of the regular NTFS and seeing if that helps at all

sorry that's all I can think of

hominid · 29 Nov 2011 at 19:47

GPT should always be used on drives larger than 2GB.

You can try installing the Intel RST drivers, versions later than 10.1 support the larger drives, but I'm not sure it'll help.