Seagate 1.5TB HD showing as 500GB

Hello all, sorry if this has been covered, but I have not been able to turn up a thread on this subject.

I can use some help installing my new Seagate 1.5TB HD as a data drive. Everything is telling me it is a 500GB drive, including the bios, a right click, and accessing the Disk Management function from Computer Management. The last function is where I was intending to format the drive and mount, but I am concerned that I will only be formating 1/3 of the drive.

I have updated my bios, and ran Seagate's DiscWizard. DiscWizard told me that I had to have a Seagate drive installed to utilize the app. For the record, I have a Seagate drive installed ;D

Sorry for the newb question here but are my concerns correct, or will the formatting of the drive make the adjustments that I am looking for?

Sys Specs:

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Intel E2180
NVIDIA 8800 GT
C: WD Black Cav 500GB (has my OS)
E: Samsung Spinpoint 400BG (Full of data)
D: Seagate 1.5TB (unpartioned, unformatted, drive in question)

TIA, Erazz

Will give it a go and report back. Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, as Zorg says, the DOS Tools from Seagate will help you. You make a disk from it and boot from this disk. It installs a mini-DOS and runs some good diagnostics. There are short and long tests of the disk surface and I warn you, the long test is REALLY long because it writes, reads and writes to every sector individually, and that's a lot for 1.5TB! It takes many hours!

However, the info I would look for is the size of the disk. It may state it in MB or GB, but be aware that Seagate calls a GB exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes. So the numbers should match up - the disk size should be 1,500 of these, just as the disk label says. Microsoft, on the other hand, calls a Gigabyte 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes and their measurement will give you a smaller number of "GB" for the same drive.

In DOS Tools there is one place where you can deliberately tell the drive to restrict itself to a smaller value than its true size. You don't want to do that, but there is a reason I'm going there. The trick is to know that the measurement is done in terms of the number of disk sectors available. Every disk sector will hold 512 bytes. So, for example, if you are limited to using 2^28 sectors (the limit imposed by the older "28-bit LBA" system), that comes to 268,435,456 sectors or 137,438,953,472 bytes, the reason that HDD's used under that older system cannot exceed 128 GB by Microsoft's way of counting.

Now, in your case, this 1.5 TB hard drive SHOULD have about 3,221,225,472 sectors to yield 1,649,267,441,664 bytes capacity. But somehow it appears to have only about 1,073,741,824 sectors for a capacity of 549,755,813,888 bytes. In the DOS Tools page for forcing the disk to limit itself, look at what it says is the current limit on the number of sectors. Is it the 3 billion + sector count, or only the 1 billion number? If it is the smaller number, or something close, it is possible that someone has previously set the limit for some unknown reason. In that case, in this same section of DOS Tools, there is a place you can tell it to restore this disk to its full size. Do that, exit from DOS Tools, and reboot into it again. Now check what it says about disk size to be sure.

On the other hand, if DOS Tools reports the disk size (that is, maximum sectors available) is the full size already, then you know that there is nothing at all wrong with the HDD unit. The problem must be somewhere else, either in the HDD controller on your mobo, or in the software drivers for it. In that case check the mobo manufacturer's website. There you should be able to find out if this is a known problem and how to fix it. It could be in the mobo's BIOS, and hopefully there is a way to download a BIOS update file plus a utility to "flash" your BIOS chip. Alternatively, there could be a software driver for the mobo's drive controller that needs to be updated in Windows.

Let us know what you find.

Same problem here.

SeaTools for DOS v2.13PGE say: "Device is 48 Bit Addressed - Number of LBAs 2930275054 ( 1500.31 GB )

When I choose the option to Set Capacity To MAX Native, in the log there is a message:
"Error on SetMaxAddressEXT(2930277167) = 51:10
Check to be sure that the drive has been Power Cycled"

Same error happens when I try to set the capacity to any other number, such as 32 GB.

It passes the Short Test with no errors.

The strangest thing is that at the very beginning (first time I connected the disk), it was visible as 1500GB. I tried to format it, got some error in Partition Magic and after restarting this 500 GB problem appeared.

I have three of the Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drives and also have a Gigabyte MB.

At first, the did show up at 1.5TB, but, after trying to install Linux in a software RAID configuration, now they are showing 500GB ?!?

A person should not have to go through the hassle of using special utilities just to get their new hard drives to work as they were supposed to. It's unfortunate that I've had them for more than 30 days so I can't just return them

I will try the Seagate tools ISO that you burn to CD then boot the CD and see what happens.

First of all, you are all right that nobody should have to fight to make a 1.5 TB drive show that size. It should come that way.

Second, for the rare cases where the drive size is wrong, using Seatools for DOS to reset the Seagate drive's capacity to max is kind of a backup procedure. If that also fails, as some of you report, run the diagnostic tests and note the results. Then contact Seagate and tell them your problem and test results. They can help you decide whether there is some simple thing that can be adjusted, or whether the drive really is faulty and needs to be replaced for free.