Question PC not seeing 12TB drive properly

[Blitzen]

Hi all, I hope someone can point me in the right direction about this, as it's doing my head in. I bought a 12TB Seagate IronWolf, slotted it into my external SATA bay, formatted it to 12TB (10.x formatted size), GPT partition, and copied a load of files to it, no problem. However, when I attached it internally to my old 'net PC (i7-4790 / 16GB) Windows would not show the drive contents at all, and drive manager showed a 2tb partition, along with around 9TB unformatted. I assumed it would be the old mobo/chipset/SATA controller at fault, and was going to replace the system soon anyway, so I picked up a cheap i5-8500 PC, bolted it all together, booted up, and it still does the same thing. 😣 Again, it's absolutely fine when in the SATA caddy, but I really need this drive to be online all the time, and not have to fire up the caddy when I want to use it.

Help!

 

[SkyNetRising]

The system has to have UEFI enabled for partitions greater than 3TB.

Nonsense.

Large capacity drive has to be partitioned in GPT, to access all the capacity.
But OS can be installed on a different (MBR partitioned) drive.
System doesn't need to be in UEFI mode.

And size limit for MBR drives is 2TB (not 3TB).

 

[evermorex76]

It can, but I want it to be inside the PC, connected to a SATA cable. I don't want to have to power-up the bay every time I need it.

Just FYI, for you or anybody, the drives do use 512e, so you COULD convert it to use 4K native so that it would be portable with that enclosure. I haven't tried using a 4K native drive in a USB enclosure that abstracts to 512b though, if you went to use it in another enclosure. It's really ridiculous that a feature that isn't advertised and isn't common (512e being what most drives have used for a long time) can completely break the ability to use the drive.

 

[dev_cyberpunk]

And size limit for MBR drives is 2TB (not 3TB).

That is actually a windows limitation.

But I did look up that Microsoft requires EFI/UEFI firmware with GPT/GUID partition after 2TB