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I've just purchased a new hard drive (3TB Western Digital Green) with the intention of transferring everything from my hard drive that has sector issues and is causing BSODs.

The problem is, the new hard drive is showing as only 746GB. The computer is an old Dell Vostro 430 i7 and I couldn't find any relevant information about it in the BIOS, however disk management will not let me use the full disk when I try to create a partition.

I've also tried creating it as a GPT drive but that only gives me an extra couple of GB, way off the 3TB advertised. I've looked online and this usually fixes it, other problems are to do with the enclosure etc but this is just an internal drive connected via SATA.

Thanks

bwDraco
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Nick
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3 Answers3

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Almost certainly the problem is that your BIOS does not support disc drives above 2TB. WD's web-site should have a patch to extend the supported disc size.

Note that there may be compatibility problems if you ever move the drive to another machine which already supports the larger drives.

AFH
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Okay, so I'm not sure which of these two fixed it, or whether it was a combination of both, but in the end I updated my BIOS and at the same time downloaded and installed the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST) RAID Driver and it worked!

I also had to clean the disk and then set it to GPT again, but it's now showing as the full 2.72TB! :)

enter image description here

Hope this helps anyone else looking at the question.

Nick
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This problem is resolved in my 10 years old HP desktop (4 cores, Windows 7 - 32 bits), exactly with your kind of drive: 3TB Western Digital Green.

In a nutshell you need 2 things to do:

  • to install the Intel RAID driver (free).
  • to use a good tool for extending the partition to the maximum size, like AOMEI Partition Assistant (freeware).

Cheers!

PS1: After all is setup property, you can uninstall both tools mentioned above.

PS2: If you have any conflict between the new 2TB or 3TB disk and the old DVD-ROM then disconnect the DVD, and get an external one (my case).

Sorinel C.
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