Windows is not recognizing my entire 3TB Hard drive.

[Damian Debolt]

I just bought a new seagate 3TB hard drive and when I hooked it up it says it is only 746GB. I will attach a screenshot of what it looks like. If you have any solutions or tips please respond.

 

[voyager1]

1st question:
Is your OS 64bit?

If so,
2nd question:
Have you run the Seagate software that enables drives greater than 2GB?

 

[Scooty99]

As I know, the 3TB drive is different from 1TB. To read more information about it here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3TB_hard_drives.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx
http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2012/10/the-difference-between-booting-mbr-and-gpt-with-grub/
Hope these articles could give you some clues.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Make sure your bios supports large drives. It may require a bios update. Be sure to have the correct chipset drivers, especially for the sata controller. Be sure to use a GPT partition, not an MBR partition. Also, if you will be using this as a boot drive your motherboard must support UEFI and you must be using a 64 bit OS.

Q. Can Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 read, write, and boot from GPT disks?

A. Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx

 

[Buffy the stapler slayer]

using seagate tools i got back to a point where the whole 3tb drive was showing as one un- allocated drive, obviously windows does not recognise this - however it is there and visible in device manager. So i tried windows drive manager, it allowed me to select the whole volume and format it as ntfs.
its now working.
never touched my Bios, just set for good old auto. My machine is an old 288mhz emachine.
my philosophy is if its made to run sata drives it will.

incidentally seagate seatools has major issues, basically seagate have written and released a heap of crap which throws up errors about something not equal to zero when you try running it, the issue has been raised on their own forum- there is a bug and they are, ignoring it. i feel justified in calling it crap, its easier than trying to shove my seagate drive up their CEOs arse.