problem Disk Space and Disk Initialization

[mystik]

I have two problems that I believe are the same.

Let me start with some background...

I am in the process of switching to a new RAID system. I bought 8 3TB drives. Two of them ended up being bad. :/ I received one of them replaced already. Should have the other one tomorrow. Anyway, the second one that went bad, I was going to see if I could repair it. I took it out of the RAID system, and put it in a BlacX enclosure. I accidentally initialized it as MBR instead of GPT. I am not certain if that is why I can't get it back to the proper size, or if something else is at play. In doing research on this, I discovered a lot of reference to motherboard SATA drivers needing to be updated, firmware on devices needing to be updated, etc. I believe I have everything updated, though. No matter what I try, I can't seem to get it to 3TB. Any thoughts?

The other is that I have a 32GB USB drive. I used disk repair software that enabled booting from the USB and copied the software onto it. That didn't pan out, possibly because of the other problem, but now this USB drive has the same problem as the drive above! It's 1.91GB in capacity, and I can't seem to get it back to the proper size either! Weird how both of these issues happened on the same day.

Hopefully someone here can shed some light. Thanks much in advance for any and all help.

 

[ddrueding]

MBR will not get you past 2TB. You will need to re-initialize as GPT.

 

[ddrueding]

When you formatted the thumb drive for booting, it likely made it a FAT partition (2GB max). You'll need to re-format that as well.

 

[Mercutio]

3TB drives need to be GPT drives rather than MBR drives to be used to their full capacity. You can fix the problem you're having my using the diskpart command line tool.

cmd
diskpart
select disk X
clean
quit

That should do it. Substitute X for the drive's number, which you can see in Disk Management.

The other drive has probably been formatted as FAT or something similarly retarded and can be fixed in basically the same way.

 

[mystik]

I did realize about the MBR not supporting greater than 2TB. I had already tried to reinitialize as GPT, but unfortunately without success.

The procedure mentioned fixed the USB drive, but did not fix the 3TB drive. It's still 746GB. Any other thoughts?

Thanks again.

PS - I had tried the clean on the 3TB drive before, and it did not work. That's why I didn't think to try it on the USB.

 

[Mercutio]

If the only thing that is wrong is that the drive is partitioned as an MBR drive, that procedure will fix it. If it doesn't fix it, then there is something else wrong, like maybe your disk controller can't see drives that big.

 

[ddrueding]

746GB is nowhere near the limits for FAT or MBR. That is due to an incompatibility between the drive and your SATA chipset. I suspect you are running it in AHCI mode? Try IDE.

 

[Bozo]

What is aBlackX and how is it connected to your computer. Can the BlackX 'see' more than 2TB?

Nevermind:

The specks on the BlacX say 'up to 2TB' and it is connected by a usb 2.0 cable. Maybe attach your hard drive directly to the
motherboard would help