External 6Tb Hard drive is now 1.5Tb!

My 6Tb external backup hard drive was having problems. I decided to reformat it. When I tried it failed & Windows identified it as a RAW drive, not NTFS.

I tried Seagate Tools but that said the drive was okay. I deleted the volume & created a Simple Volume, then formatted to NTFS but it now only reads 1.5Tb. The only thing I can think of the portions of the drive had gone bad but 1.5Tb is still working.

What happened? Can it be restored to the full 6Tb?

This may help you work out what's going on:
How to Break Hard Drive Limit in Windows 10 Easily?

- needs to be GPT to see the whole as one disk.

dalchina said:

This may help you work out what's going on:
How to Break Hard Drive Limit in Windows 10 Easily?

- needs to be GPT to see the whole as one disk.

Thanks, It is GPT but reads 1.46TB

Samuria said:

Post a screen shot from disk management showing all details so we can see

The drive is GPT.

I use the drive in a miniStack v2.5 as a USB backup. It has run great for years until yesterday when it seemed to be lost finding it's last saved data point. I thought I'd just clean the drive by reformatting, then save my data new. The formatting failed & said the drive was RAW, not NTFS. I deleted the volume & created a Simple Volume, then formatted to NTFS but it now only reads 1.5Tb. The only thing I can think of the portions of the drive had gone bad but 1.5Tb is still working.
The drive now says Unallocated but it can be NTFS but at only 1.5Tb.

Hi @GARoss ,

From your post #3 dated 31 Aug 2017 here in 6tb external hard drive reads 1.5tb unallocated in Windows 10? ( Thanks to MisterEd )

"Thanks. It appears the issue was because I had the new, unformatted drive setup as an external USB drive. I have since connected the drive in my case via SATA & now able to format to NTFS all 6Tb. I'll move it back to USB but I'm guessing it will be okay now that it's formatted."

Have you tried formatting it directly (connected to the motherboard SATA ) as before? May be your vintage miniStack v 2.5 is limited to handle only upto 1.5TB HDDs.

miniStack v2.5 Pricing:

• 80GB capacity, 8MB cache for $104.99
• 160GB capacity, 8MB cache for $112.99
• 250GB capacity, 8MB cache for $127.99
• 320GB capacity, 16MB cache for $137.99
• 500GB capacity, 16MB cache for $149.99
• 750GB capacity, 32MB cache for $199.99
• 1.0TB capacity, 32MB cache for $279.99
• 0GB Enclosure Kit for $79.99
• 0GB Enclosure Kit with Software bundle for $89.99

I take it the drive showed the full 6Tb before the problem?
Have you tried cleaning it via diskpart?
Open powershell with admin & enter:
diskpart
list disk
select disk X (where x is the number of the problem hard drive)
clean
exit

Now go to disc management & it should ask you to initialise the drive, allow this, then format it.

Stigg said:

That's the same person.

Good one, but I have already tried that. Still 1.5TB