Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of nestey
nestey

asked on

Hard drive not seen as full size

I am trying to add a Seagate 4TB hard drive to a Dell Precision 380 desktop running XP Pro. The BIOS reconizes it as a 4TB drive but Windows Disk management sees it as 1.6TB. I want this a 2nd drive just for data
Avatar of pjam
pjam
Flag of United States of America image

You have probably formatted in NTFS which would require creating partitions with a third party App.
You need to review GPT at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/windows/hardware/gg463524.aspx
You may have to run windows updates as windows xp cannot by default read disks over 1TB unless you install the patches from windows updates.
This answered EE question may have some bearing on the problem:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/27908075/3-TB-SATA-hard-drive-show-up-as-750-GB-hard-drive-on-Dell-Optiplex-980.html

Older hardware and OSes struggle with the much newer Advanced Format drives of more than 2.2TB, as such drives use larger sector sizes to stay inside the 2^32 sector count limit imposed by the MBR in systems such as yours.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of rindi
rindi
Flag of Switzerland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
a system that old i can't see how the drive can even function properly - you'll hit hardware limitations before you get to anything in the operating system

spec sheet states 2tb maximum storage

http://www.itema-pg.com/PC/Desktop/precn_380_en_spec.pdf
Avatar of nestey
nestey

ASKER

Thanks all looks like I will upgrade this machine to Win 7