Help with a 3TB drive

[Greg King]

Hey folks,

I'm looking for some help on getting a 3TB drive that I recently got back from RMA to work. Windows only sees one 746GB partition and another partition containing the remainder of the space. I cannot delete the 746 partition in either Windows of Linux and am kind of at wits end.

It's a Hitachi drive and it's been quite a headache since buying it, then RMAing it and then getting it back.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

How are the partitions formatted? Have you tried Gparted Live (the bootable iso)?

 

[marfig]

1. On the command prompt type diskpart and answer to any possible UAC prompt.
2. On the new diskpart prompt, type list disk. Note the Disk ### column.
3. Type, select disk ### (with ### being the disk you wish to delete. Potentially the disk with partition 0 with a size of 746 GB)
4. Finish by typing, clean.

That should do it.

 

[Greg King]

1. On the command prompt type diskpart and answer to any possible UAC prompt.
2. On the new diskpart prompt, type list disk. Note the Disk ### column.
3. Type, select disk ### (with ### being the disk you wish to delete. Potentially the disk with partition 0 with a size of 746 GB)
4. Finish by typing, clean.

That should do it.

I tried this. Unfortunately (and I know I misspoke in my initial post), the 746GB partition isnt formatted and cannot be initialized. I cannot select it from the command line because diskpart cannot see it. Sorry for the confusion.

 

[Rob Williams]

Did you try right-clicking the left-most part of that disk and converting it to GPT?

 

[Greg King]

Did you try right-clicking the left-most part of that disk and converting it to GPT?

Yes. It treats the 746GB part and the other part as completely seperate. I have read that the 746GB part is one platter and is treated as it's own drive. I might RMA the RMA'd drive

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

What does your BIOS show for the drive?

 

[RainMotorsports]

What does your BIOS show for the drive?

I was curious about the support on 3TB for his board. Im guessing the SSD is the boot drive so the boot problem is out but still its iffy isnt it?

 

[Tharic-Nar]

2.19TB is the limit for a non GPT drive, any additional space will just be seen as an unformatted partition which you can not access, symptomatic of your issue. The entire drive needs to be setup as a GPT drive in order to access all data, you can't split the drive up as both an MBR and GPT drive.

If the drive is a boot drive, then you need a GPT enabled BIOS or EFI, otherwise it will only see/use 2TB, since it will be using the standard MBR table. The only way around that would be to use one of those 512 to 4K remapping tools that certain motherboards provided (can't remember if it was ASUS or GBT that had a tool you could use...).

EDIT:

I remember now, i did a news piece on this a while back - should help you out...

http://techgage.com/news/asus_disk_unlocker_-_beyond_the_2tb_limit/

 

[Greg King]

I was curious about the support on 3TB for his board. Im guessing the SSD is the boot drive so the boot problem is out but still its iffy isnt it?

I had the same model of Hitachi 3TB drive connected to this machine when it died and I didn't run into these issues. The board itself handled it fine.

 

[Greg King]

2.19TB is the limit for a non GPT drive, any additional space will just be seen as an unformatted partition which you can not access, symptomatic of your issue. The entire drive needs to be setup as a GPT drive in order to access all data, you can't split the drive up as both an MBR and GPT drive.

If the drive is a boot drive, then you need a GPT enabled BIOS or EFI, otherwise it will only see/use 2TB, since it will be using the standard MBR table. The only way around that would be to use one of those 512 to 4K remapping tools that certain motherboards provided (can't remember if it was ASUS or GBT that had a tool you could use...).

EDIT:

I remember now, i did a news piece on this a while back - should help you out...

http://techgage.com/news/asus_disk_unlocker_-_beyond_the_2tb_limit/

Thank you Tharic. I'll give it a go.

 

[Kougar]

Tharic-Nar mentioned the first thing that came to mind. After looking at the BIOS download page I can't tell if Gigabyte released a 3TB capable BIOS update for that board or not. It doesn't look like they have.

Let us know if that ASUS utility fixes the issue for ya!