I had previously seen something about Intel RST drivers, but had got the impression that this only applied to much newer machines than my Dell workstation. That impression was wrong and an out of date RST driver is now looking much more likely to be the cause of my problem.
I've already tried running the latest RST update provided by Dell, but this was incompatible with my machine. I will have to find an older version.
Are you sure disk 0 is low formatted as GPT?
On disk manager, on the top menu: View - Top - List disk
The List Disk view in Disk Management shows drive 0 has a Partition Style of GPT. To my surprise, it also lists it with a Device Type of SAS instead of SATA, like my other internal disks.
BTW, according to Webopedia, "Modern hard drives are low-level formatted at the factory for the life of the drive", so I suspect your use of "low formatted" was not quite accurate. The correct wording would appear to be Partition Style.
You're right about GUID Partition Table (GPT). GUID Partition Table - Wikipedia
Download CrystalDiskInfo
It's a portable, doesn't need to install. Unzip and run.
It will tell everything about your disks
CrystalDiskInfo confirms that my new disk has a SATA interface and has a size of 4TB.
I'm currently working on trying to update the BIOS on my machine.
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My system BIOS is actually dated Nov 2018 and is up to date. I mistakenly thought it was dated Aug 2008 because during the boot sequence the display refers to an MPTBIOS with that date.
I now know that the MPTBIOS is not the same thing as the system BIOS. It relates to the Dell SAS Adapter in my workstation. I don't have any SAS disks, despite the misleading reference in Disk Management mentioned earlier, so the version of the MPTBIOS does not seem of any importance.
I will now return to investigating how to update the Intel RST driver.
An idea crossed my mind. Make a system backup/restore point or whatever and uninstall Intel RST driver. Use ms standard ahci driver for testing.
After further investigation, it doesn't look like RST is actually installed on my workstation. An attempt to install it also failed, so I suspect that the chip set on my machine is too old to meet RST requirements.
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I can't explain that. The graphical display in the lower half of the screen only ever showed a single bar for Disk 0.
Now that I have allocated a drive letter to Disk 0, Disk Management makes no reference to any partition number in the Volume label. It just shows my chosen name of MyData3 (G:), while the Status is shown as Healthy (Primary Partition).
Something made Windows give it that 'partition 2' name originally - suggest you try any one of a number of partitioning utilities, in case there is something there that for some reason Windows (disk management) can't see.
Hi @haggis999 ,
I am inclined to think that your system does not support larger than 2TB drives. You may contact DELL support to confirm ( I may be wrong) and discuss the issue. They should be knowing better than anyone of us here.
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