3TB down to 746gb with no cure

[Silestus]

I have 9 terabytes (Yep, 9), and for some reason that have ALL crapped out on me.

At first my 1st one worked fine, but a part of it died and I had it replaced. The data was slightly corrupted due to a surge but I recovered the data so no problem there

I tried to backup the info to my two other external seagate 3TB hard drives but now they say they need to be re formatted. I find this strange as when I got them brand new they didn't need to be reformatted, everything was in working order. Now after I reformat them in NTFS format, all that's left is 746gb of storage space.

Now here's the twist, ive done all the guides for 746gb problems, from convert mbr to gpt, and yet NOTHING works

Is there any hope for this?

 

[popatim]

Did you take them out of their enclosures by any chance?

 

[Silestus]

Not at first, they were all fine, but I pulled them out of the enclosures after they started acting funny in order to interface with them directly

1 - Drives acted fine
2 - 1st drive had its connector burn out - pulling it out fixed this, data is corrupted by retrievable - I wanted to back up this info on my spare drives
3 - Other 2 3TB drives are plugged in, both now need to be reformatted, which I do, now I only read 746gb at all times
4 - Read into this error as I've never had it before, never.
5 - Follow steps to reformat drives from MBR to GPT, drives still do not read higher
6 - Update bios on both computers but it doesn't work - Some say I need to be on UEFI, but I have a laptop with windows 8.1 on UEFI and they still don't read higher
7 - I use Easeus partition master 10.2 to check and convert

Any of that help?

 

[eatmypie]

By any chance are you using something like processor monitor? Also did you try something like Gparted to see if the manufacture of the external drive used some like AES 256 encryption to make an encrypted partition? When I opened up my WD cloud drive I had a similar issue, unless it was running off of whatever firmware that was on the cloud device itself it wouldn't decrypt the partition if it was taken out so it would play dead. If you use something like gparted it will show you any hidden partitions and simply let you reformat them to your liking. the process monitor part that I said at first was just because sometimes if not configured right it will eat up all of your drive space, but after reading your question again it seems like a fresh start.

 

[Silestus]

Im not using a process monitor...that I know of. Haven't used Gparted to see is aes 256 encryption, like I said, these worked when I bought them, they just sat without power for like a month and then when I boot them up, bam

I'll look into the process monitor thing again, and gparted, but so far still no fix

 

[popatim]

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218619en?language=en_US

please read

 

[Silestus]

My sorry for the delay gentlemen, I haven't had a chance to implement this stuff yet. My workload has increased, but I will test it soon, Friday or Saturday at the latest

 

[Silestus]

Preliminary testing yielded no results, the problem persists. For Popatim, it led me to seatools discwizard and dead video links, but I ran discwizard and tried to "extend" them, but it did not detect any more space. In the Disk Management section, there is Seagate Extended Capacity Manager, which I assume is what I'm looking for (the videos also point to this), but when I click on it says "The entire space is accessible: there are no hard drives with MBR partition style larger than 2tb in your system or sector's size on your disk is larger than 512kb. All hard drives can be managed by "Add New Disk tool"

For Eatmypie...nice name by the way, it...doesn't appear to have an aes 256 encryption. Haven't tried the process monitor thing yet

Drives have currently been switched back and forth between GPT, now back to MBR. No current change
Acer aspire 5741 laptop - Running windows 7 64-bit
BIOS - InsydeH2O Version V1.23
4GB ram
500gb hard drive

BIOS was updated to latest version, but I can't switch over operating systems to support UEFI because I need to back up hard drive data, and I can't do that because I don't have the space without the 3tbs

 

[eatmypie]

Did you purchase any type of plan when you bought the drive? IT just really seems at this point the drive might just have something funky going on. Did you try doing something like contacting the manufacture to see they have any say?

 

[MyDNA]

have you used windows dos command "diskpart" to manage the drive? or did you only use third party tool?
I had a similar issue, be it that the 3TB HDD was mbr, so disk manager saw only the first 2TB with another unallocated partition of some 7xxGB, which was unusable due to mbr 2TB limitation.

I used diskpart like so:
Open cmd prompt as administrator, type the following commands followed by enter after each one:

diskpart
list disk
select disk # [change # for the disk number shown in list disk command above that is 3TB]
clean all
convert=gpt
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs label="New Volume" quick
assign
active
exit

Now see if you can see all 3TB in Windows Explorer... Good luck!

Hope this helps... at least somone.

 

[Silestus]

I ordered these 3tb's off ebay for 100$ a piece, I was given a choice for 30 days to choose a warranty but did not because they worked fine when they arrived. The seller had excellent reviews, so I never questioned it or him

But my question is why....why does all 3 of my computers not see it as 3tb, and only as 746gb. Is the drive locked in place at 746gb? can it be reset?

I wiped the drives with easeus partition master, back to unallocated and MBR, and so far they all still read funky, but why not even on my windows 8.1 laptop?

Another thing is that a lot of people say its the RST raid controller. It won't update on my laptop with windows 7, but it did on my desktop with windows 7, and haven't tried on my windows 8 laptop

 

[Silestus]

Still nothing has worked, now I'm going to send them in to Seagate, which is annoying as it'll take a couple weeks