3TB Hard Drive Comes Up As 746GB

[sethstewart16]

Hello, i have a 3TB Hard Drive that only comes up as 746GB and i am running Windows XP Professional on a HP Pavilion a732n. What can i do to fix this problem?

 

[dudio]

Open up Disk Management in Windows and see what is says about the hard drive:
https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/snap_disk_admin.mspx?mfr=true

 

[sethstewart16]

When i open up disk management, its comes up saying "746.50 GB". But i have a 3TB Hard Drive.

 

[Shaun o]

Hi seth,

Why the drive is 3Tb in size but you can only see a partition or formatted drive of 746Gb in side can be down to two reasons Seth.

The first is to do with how old the motherboard you have is in age, as older motherboards when it comes to the size or free space a hard drive has can often be limited by the age of the motherboard or bios because it is, or was only programmed to recognize a drive of a maximum capacity or storage space when it was new. As hard drives in physical sizes in capacity available at the time were smaller, if you understand.

The second reason is all to do with how you formatted the drive.
Windows can use two types of file system to lay down when you format the new raw drive.
Fat 32 that can only format a drive size, or individual partition size of 32 Gb total.

Ntfs is newer and can format a drive size, or partition made on the drive of a maximum size of 2 TB.

To get around the problem of only having 746Gb of formatted drive showing instead of the 3Tb in physical capacity, drive size or space the drive has.

You will need to format the drive and set a partition size of 1.5Tb for the drive.
And then create a second Partition on the 3Tb drive of, or near 1.5Tb in size also Seth.

Once done and formatted so windows os can see the drive.
You will be left with a drive letter Assignment of C: and D: two data partitions on a single physical 3Tb drive seth.

If the drive is a secondary drive intended to be used as data storage, and you already have a C: drive with windows xp installed on it.

Let windows xp load up with the 3Tb drive connected to the system.

Click on start in windows.
And in the search box type : Disk Man
Click on the create partitions and format drives search result.
Run the program.

You will then see a list of all the Hard drives connected to the computer, or system you have.
Find the drive in question.
Right click on the main panel of the new window box open where the 3Tb drive is listed.
Check to see if it says 746Gb formatted and says 2.35 Tb un allocated.
Ok .

So if it does format the whole drive again.
Then right click like you did before and select create partition.
Put in a size of about 1.5Tb in as the partition size.
Then select format drive.

After it is done click on the un allocated space that should report around 1.5 Tb in size.
And select format.
Or create a second partition size of 1.5Tb.
Then format the second partition created.

Once done.

You should see in windows file manager or explorer.

C:\ The working Os drive with windows xp installed on it
D:\ Drive 1.5 Tb of free space.
E:\ Drive 1.5 Tb of free drive space seth.

NB: drive letter may differ if you have more than one physical drive fitted to the system before adding the new 3Tb drive.

Ok.
Hope it helps you anyway...