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3TB disk seen as 746GB on Windows 7 64bit


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The whole point that you (and now you are in good company with dencorso :whistle: ) seemingly missed is that THERE IS NO NEED WHATEVER to completely wipe a disk if not in one single case, which is when you are going to give the disk away, and you fear for the data that may have remained on it.

What it may be needed at the most when there is a "tricky" issue connected to detection of a disk or (and this is not the case) booting issues may be to wipe:

  1. 2 (two) bytes
    OR
  2. 512 (fivehundredandtwelve) bytes
    OR
  3. some initial sectors, at the very most 2048 of them

If you are not planning on installing an OS on this disk, there is no reason to convert it to GPT.

Can you access more than 2.2 Tb on a MBR disk? :w00t:

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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If you are not planning on installing an OS on this disk, there is no reason to convert it to GPT.

Can you access more than 2.2 Tb on a MBR disk? :w00t:

jaclaz

Sure why not? Well its not a boot volume... The volumes in the servers I manage have 2.2TB+ or more on their storage drives and they are not GPT. :whistle:

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Sure why not? Well its not a boot volume... The volumes in the servers I manage have 2.2TB+ or more on their storage drives and they are not GPT. :whistle:

Because last time I checked in the MBR the Start LBA (sectors before the partition) and Num LBA (number of sectors in a partition entry) were made of 4 bytes.

so, if you have first partition starting (say) at offset 2048 (0x00000800) and you set the number of sectors in it to 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF) you have already used all the addressable space. (still talking of 512 bytes/sector disks).

And of course these guys here are liars according to your experience :w00t::ph34r: :

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218619en

http://www.uefi.org/learning_center/UEFI_MBR_Limits_v2.pdf

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/D213A024C090CE9F862577D5002600FC/$file/FinalHiCap_2.2TB_TechBrief.pdf

jaclaz

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@cdob. where can I find that information? I looked at all possible locations in Device Manager but didn't see msachi.sys showing up at all

to all. thanks for the help, the problem is still not solved. after I partitioned the disk using the USB, and put into the windows 7 64bit box, it has a problem. the computer management shows all parititons healthy, but from my computer, the last partition is shown as unformatted. This is the same symptom why the first disk failed -- it was fine for a while and then all of a sudden the very last partition would show up as unformatted. I tried to do chkdsk and all hell broke loose.

I guess the fundamental question is, is this a Windows issue, or a mobo issue? I read somewhere that a mobo should have uefi to support disks > 2.2 TB, which I don't think my mobo has; but then again, the BIOS recognizes the disk correctly, and so does PartedMagic. so I am not sure what the heck is going on.

Edited by standingbear
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@bphlpt

I formatted the 3TB disk from Windows vista 32bit, and the disk was in a USB enclosure. The disk is now a data disk inside a Windows 7 64bit box, with the latest updates applied.

cut the disk into 4 partitions, 750GBx3, plus the remaining one.

mobo is ASRock 960GB/U3S3 FX

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Did you use the standard Vista built-in Format, or some other software tool? Did you make any format option changes or did you just accept all the defaults? Any reason you didn't just do all the partitioning and formatting in the Win 7 x64 box? Can you try that?

Cheers and Regards

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As it is over 2Tb, the disk should be gpt . As it doesn't need to be bootable, you should already have a device driver to support but perhaps not the lastest one.

After booting on your windows 7 x64, go to device manager, and find the "friendly name" of the wd 3tb (should be WDC WD30EZRX under disk drives) , then in the view menu select device by connection and deploy everything needed to find again the wd 3tb. What you 'll know then is the on which sata controller is connected the drive. Then right click on the device controller and select properties and go to driver tab. You should see the date and the version of the driver then clicking on driver detail will also let us know which file is used as device driver. This driver is most likely completely out of date and should be updated.

For the record, amd lastest chipset drivers are there.

And lastest asmedia sata 3 drivers are there (taken from asus website as asmedia doesn't have an official open support site).

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I can't believe this. Thank you all, especially allen2 and bphlpt. I went to the Asrock's website as well as using the device driver -> update driver from microsoft, which all said I was using the latest driver, but it never occurred to me to check from AMD directly. Yes, it was indeed a way out-of-date AMD SATA controller driver, and now it is seeing the disks without any problems. I am happy and mad at the same time.

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