So I've got a 4TB WD Red drive. Brand new. Shipped from WD to replace my original 4TB drive that was having problems that I attributed to the hard drive, but it might be a Windows 7 problem that suddenly developed instead.
Going into disk management, it gives me the option to initialize as MBR or GPT. I choose GPT because it's 4TB. But when going to format, I can only format for 1677.9 GB. Same results if I try to use MiniTools Partition Wizard, as well. If I want to format this for the full 4TB, I have to boot into GPartEd from a flash drive and use that to format it. Once I use GPartEd to format as 4TB, then Windows can reformat it to 4TB no problem. But it won't recognize the full size before.
The problem I was having with the previous 4TB drive that this is replacing is that it would be corrupted after every restart. I would write about 2.5TB of data to the drive, and within minutes, more and more directories would become inaccessible, and one restart later, all the data would be lost and Windows would report that the drive was unformatted. After cleaning and reinitializing the old drive, I had the same problem of needing to use GPartEd to get the full 4TB. I haven't tried filling this new drive yet to see if this has the same problem, but I'm afraid it might.
This drive is used for data backup, it only gets plugged in every few weeks to update any file changes, and then goes back in storage in a shockproof hard drive case. My PC case has a hot swap bay, but I don't use it to hot swap, I only insert or remove hard drives while the PC is off. I used my previous hard drive like this for over two years without a problem, but I went to make a backup last week and suddenly this problem started.
So what could change in a Windows installation that would suddenly break its ability to work with 4TB drives? And how do I revert that change so I can get Windows working the way it used to again?
Thanks.
Going into disk management, it gives me the option to initialize as MBR or GPT. I choose GPT because it's 4TB. But when going to format, I can only format for 1677.9 GB. Same results if I try to use MiniTools Partition Wizard, as well. If I want to format this for the full 4TB, I have to boot into GPartEd from a flash drive and use that to format it. Once I use GPartEd to format as 4TB, then Windows can reformat it to 4TB no problem. But it won't recognize the full size before.
The problem I was having with the previous 4TB drive that this is replacing is that it would be corrupted after every restart. I would write about 2.5TB of data to the drive, and within minutes, more and more directories would become inaccessible, and one restart later, all the data would be lost and Windows would report that the drive was unformatted. After cleaning and reinitializing the old drive, I had the same problem of needing to use GPartEd to get the full 4TB. I haven't tried filling this new drive yet to see if this has the same problem, but I'm afraid it might.
This drive is used for data backup, it only gets plugged in every few weeks to update any file changes, and then goes back in storage in a shockproof hard drive case. My PC case has a hot swap bay, but I don't use it to hot swap, I only insert or remove hard drives while the PC is off. I used my previous hard drive like this for over two years without a problem, but I went to make a backup last week and suddenly this problem started.
So what could change in a Windows installation that would suddenly break its ability to work with 4TB drives? And how do I revert that change so I can get Windows working the way it used to again?
Thanks.
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