4 TB Seagate HDD not showing in Disk Management.

Samboskull

Honorable
Sep 11, 2012
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10,510
Hi,

I just purchased a Seagate 4TB internal HDD today. I got home, plugged it into my tower, booted up and was slightly puzzled to see that it wasn't there. (EDIT: In "This PC")

Not a problem I thought, I'll just go into Disk Management, it probably needs initializing. So I loaded up Disk Management. My 200 GB (seagate) system drive shows up, my 1TB (WD) storage drive shows up (and its partition)... And then a mystery "Disk 2". I figure, this has got to the 4 TB Seagate. It says it's not initialized. Worryingly, it also states that the drive is only 128 GB.

Odd! So I went ahead and initialized the drive. It asked be, MBR or GPT. I thought well, lets just hit it with MBR. (I recall reading somewhere, in hindsight, that MBR is cannot handle a data size, over 2 TB or so? Either way, I don't think it has anything to do with the problem). After a few seconds a message popped up, saying something along the lines of "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error".

So I tried again, initialize, picked GPT, same thing again. So I pottered about online, tried to find a solution to this. Restarted the computer, just to see if I could see it in the BIOS, and sure enough I could see three drives, one with UEFI over the top which I take it must be my system drive, and the other two being the WD and the 4TB Segate.

So I booted back into Windows, still nothing, opened up Disk Management... And it's gone. It's not there any more, the mystery 128 GB Disk 2. I booted back into my BIOS, disconnected the 1 TB WD so it was just the system disk and the new 4TB HDD, and the BIOS only shows one disk, the system disk. Where did it go?!

I'm a bit fuzzy on my exact MoBo, I think it's a Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H.. I think. Like 99% positive. I'm using Windows 8.1 64-bit, Intel i5-3570.

Can someone please dig me out of this low-storage-capacity hell?
 
Couple things you could do, the first is to check and see if UEFI is selected in the BIOS, since Legacy won't support your drive.

Second, download Seagate Tools and run a full diag on the drive. The utility will have tools (either a windows GUI or a boot image) that will detect the drive and scan for errors.

I've had a lot of DOA drives from online retailers such as amazon or newegg. Probably a shipping thing. So if your drive does not pass the tests, just simply RMA it.
 


It does, ST4000DM000. Good news, it's now showing in Disk Management again, this time as Disk 0, still 128 GB.
 


Thanks, it's now showing in Seatools, when it wasn't before, told me it failed due to problem sectors. Says the DOS should fix this no problem so I'm going to try that now and I'll report back.
 


That's what I thought, but Seatools GUI said that DOS can sort it.

Turns out, it lied, DOS couldn't sort it. RMA for this brick!

Thanks for all the help guys.
 
if you read what I sent it don't repare it by passes or flages them if info was found in the bad area it will ''try to relocate it to a good part of the drive but whats been corrupted when it went bad???

your starting off on a bad foot a new drive should be issue free not bad out of the box [opinion]

'' When a sector is found to be bad or unstable by the firmware of a disk controller, the disk controller remaps the logical sector to a different physical sector. In the normal operation of a hard drive, the detection and remapping of bad sectors should take place in a manner transparent to the rest of the system and in advance before data is lost. It should be remembered, however, that the damaging of the physical body of the hard drive does not solely affect one area of the data stored. Very often physical damages can interfere with parts of many different files.''