I hate being "legacy free", I prefer being as backwards compatible as it gets. Hence I always use MBR, unless I install in UEFI mode or I have a disk larger than 2TB. Keeping it backwards-compatible lets you troubleshoot using any utilities available, while in GPT mode you may have not access with old tools (Hiren's CD etc).
I booted up from a Macrium rescue disk and noted that the drive shows up as a GPT 1.68 GB drive. There was a drive 'X' as a source and destination disk but I didn't know which physical drive it was and didn't want to touch it. I suspected it is the 4 TB drive. Going back to WIndows it doesn't show up as any drive (I was hoping I'd see a drive 'X:' but nothing). In Disk Management it shows up as 1685 GB RAW (Basic and Healthy) with an option when you right click on it to format it as NTFS or exFAT.
Next steps: a live Linux distro or wait until I can get it install in a desktop and connected directly to a motherboard.
I bought these used drives because they were cheap ($30 for 4 TB) and I can use them for seldom used files that I can archive. Moving forward, I'm done buying HDD. From now on.... I'll just buy and use SSDs and also use whatever HDD I already have.
If unsure of which disk it is, see Disk Management or right-click on the disk on This PC and then Properties, then click the Hardware tab to see the device model. Google it to see what capacity it is. If it is 4TB, then you should convert to GPT to be able to expand a single partition to take all space. If you see the wrong capacity in Disk Management, then it might be that your SATA controller doesn't fully support the disk. You could try switching the disk from IDE to AHCI in BIOS or vice versa.
I just re-read the first post. My apologies; somehow it didn't register that the OP had already formatted the drive as NTFS, and that it was being used as an external.
I'd want to test it in a desktop PC on a straight SATA connection, but I don't know whether that is an option for bofhlusr.
He has no choice. As it seems the SATA to USB adapter (or enclosure) does not support greater than 2TB disks. Unless he finds a newer model that does, he must put the disk inside the computer with SATA cable. It should be must faster than even USB 3.0
If you want to try, i managed to fix several "stubborn" drives in Linux, I assume this is not a bios/controller issue otherwise the following may be vain.
Download Ubuntu (18.10 or 18.04) and create bootable usb with rufus (backup usb data first)
Run live Ubuntu, now be careful to choose the right drive, so start without the external 4tb usb
open up terminal and launch this command:
now attach the usb drive, in the terminal you'll see some messages it will tell you the drive "name" like in the image below:Code:tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep sd
let's say it will be "sdc" ( every partition will have a number, i.e. sdc1 ... etc)
once you know the drive "name" open up a second terminal and launch this:
after this you can try to reformat the drive and it should give you full capacity (4Tb).Code:sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1
This worked for me, hope it can for you.
Thank you all for the suggestions. I am going to try them all but it might take time. I'll work on it and provide updates to this thread moving forward.
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