5TB drive only showing as 561.53GB

jumanji said:

The fsutil shows the drive as neither 520e (520 logical sector size and 4096 physical sector size) nor 4Kn drive ( 4096 logical sector size and 4096 Physical sector size . It only shows the drive as an ordinary Disk 512/512 and not an AF disk at all with the total sectors one eighth of the total sectors of a 5TB drive. Very strange and baffling.

As Megahertz found out all x300 disks should be 4Kn disks.
Now the questions:

You are saying that you had Windows 7 on it.

1. You bought the HDD and so I presume you must have installed Window 7 on it. Right?

@jumanji

Yes. I bought the 5TB drive on 14 Feb 2020 as a retail box but cloned a previous Win 7 installation onto it using Macrium Reflect (so the OS and all programs/data/files etc, were duplicated) rather than a clean install of Win 7. I then used the 5TB drive as both the System and Data Disk (risky I know!) for four months without a problem (except that I could only use 2TB!)

I didn't know about the 2.2TB limit at the time for a disk using the MBR scheme. As it was working at the time I was loathe to do anything to it - such as converting it to GPT.

The 5TB drive was a clone of a smaller 2TB hard disk (again being used as the System Disk and Data Disk). I have spent the last few days (isn't lockdown due to Covid-19 useful?) making sure that all new documents that had been stored on the 5TB disk since February had been copied to the 2TB disk (so that both 2TB and 5TB disks had identical dosuments/photos/videos, etc on them).

This meant a constant swapping of the drives connected to the mobo and using a large capacity SD card as the transfer medium between the 5 and 2TB disks. Both disks remained screwed in place within the desktop - only the connections were altered. I did this because both drives were bootable and I didn't want any conflicts!

Only after I had bought (last week) a copy of Win 10 Pro and a 240GB SSD did I physically remove the 5TB drive.

However, disconnecting the Win 10 SSD and re-connecting the 5TB drive I got the 'Boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. Status 0xc000000e' message from WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER.

2. Right now you have an SSD with Windows 10 on it. And yes no doubt about it.

3. Remove the 5TB HDD and connect it internally as a secondary dive.

4. Run the fsutility and check what it says. 520/4096 or 4096/4096 or 520/520? Take a screenshot and keep it.

5. Now remove the Win10 SSD connect the 5TB HDD as a primary drive and try to install Win7 SP1 ( Remember only Win7SP1 and above can take an AF Disk as per OS compatibility with AF disks).. Does the instalation see your disk as a 5TB one, format it as you did the first time?

If it is not possible, then something has gone wrong with that HDD. ( You were able to do it before but cannot do it now .That you have a successful installation of WIn 10 clears the motherboard of any fault in it.)

I know that this is a long and tedious procedure but honestly I can't think of any other way. If others can suggest any other easier method to bell the cat, I would be happy .

I know you are now trying to wipe it with Linux and then format it. Go ahead with it and check whether you can regain all 5TB when connected through the USB interface as well direct connection to the motherboard. If it fails then you can go with the above suggested procedure, if others couldn't suggest any other easy method.

I shall now sit back and watch since I have no other suggestion/s.

For preference, I'd rather not 'fiddle' any more with the 5TB drive as it now seems to be all working again. The engineer's voice inside my head says "If it ain't broke - don't fix it".

As to trying to wipe the drive using Linux, again there seems little point. The only reason for wiping the drive was in case it had to go back to the manufacturer/retailer (and/or trying to obtain a single partition approaching 4.5/5TB).

I may try a 'scrubbing' program to overwrite what is (currently) an empty partition. Can you suggest something (it needs to be fast as a 5TB disk will take a LONG time - especially if 3 passes are used).

I've also had a poke around in BIOS to see what settings the SSD is using (in case everything goes south again) and the SATA Mode Selection is set to AHCI. I'm pretty sure, but not 100%, that it was previously set to the other option which is IDE - anyway that is now all written down.

Is this why the 5TB drive when connected internally as the boot drive was unrecognised as the disk was formatted according to the MBR partitioning scheme?

Art

MBR partition size is limited to 2TB.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...rger-than-2-tb

@ArthurDent -

Did you run the Toshiba Diagnostics and fsutil with the appropriate switches?
What was the output? Please post.



P.S. What about this?

However, disconnecting the Win 10 SSD and re-connecting the 5TB drive I got the 'Boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. Status 0xc000000e' message from WINDOWS BOOT MANAGER.

Boot order in BIOS?

f14tomcat said:

MBR partition size is limited to 2TB.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...rger-than-2-tb

Thanks.

When I bought the 5TB disk in February, I wasn't aware of the 2.2TB limit for an MBR disk. Immediately I wasn't seeing the full 5TB, I was puzzled and a bit of research uncovered this 'nugget' of information.

compumind said:

Did you run the Toshiba Diagnostics and fsutil with the appropriate switches?
What was the output? Please post.

Here you go.



and the Toshiba Storage Diagnostics Log File (note HDD S/No. has been redacted)



Click / double-click on the image to expand??

Hope these are of some interest!

Regards

Art

5TB. Wow.

- - - Updated - - -

This thread has 8 pages. Wow.

@ArthurDent -

OK! Thanks for the information.

Now enjoy!

Sweetsweetcorn said:

5TB. Wow.

Naah. You can get 16TB right now. Higher densities are coming.