3 TB HD not seen in My Computer

jaymax

Distinguished
Jun 17, 2009
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0
18,510
I am running a computer with several SATA drives, ECS MOBO - K8T890-A, with 'Legacy Bios' and running XP - Sp3. Recently purchased a Seagate 3 TB HD with the assurance that using Seagate Disc Wizard the entire 3 TB can be accessed.

I partitioned the drive into 3 volumes, 1.0, 1.0 & 0,75 TB with the wizard. However, these are not seen on the 'My Computer' listings, it is not seen in the 'Logical Disk Management , but the full disk is recognized on the VIA Bios listing on the POST and the Device Manager (NO Yellow asterisk either.

I called Seagate and spoke with one of their Tech Support people, she might have tried her best, but said that it might be a "Windows problem".

Does this seem reasonable? is there some driver required? is some service that's meant to be turned on? ,,, etc!

Thanks !
 

onichikun

Distinguished
Nov 13, 2009
304
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18,860


Those large drives use GPT, which Windows XP cannot read out-of-the-box.

There is probably a 3rd party driver that can allow Windows XP to read GPT... a quick google resulted in; http://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/components/gpt-loader/

Not sure if it works though.

EDIT: Even though you partitioned the drive in 1TB chunks which should be readable in WindowsXP, its likely the partition table format is unknown by the default windows driver stack.
EDIT 2: After doing some research, using the Seagate Wizard shoud allow the drive to be read in windows XP despite Windows XP not supporting advanced formats. By any chance do you have the drive in an external enclosure?