Seagate 2TB Hard Drive Only Showing 232 GB

Aug 26, 2018
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Just got the drive this morning to replace my WD Black 1TB. I've been searching for an answer for three (3) solid hours, and I've come up with nothing. As with a lot of users here it looks like, Seagate is giving me a hard time with its HDD. I've tried a lot of the different solutions, and I'm coming up with nothing.

I have a Seagate External Hard Drive for my Mac, and I've had no problems with it. But apparently, the internal drives require a lot more of a jump. But anyway:

I'm using a Seagate 2TB 64MB Cache 7200RPM SATA2 3.0Gb/s (Heavy-Duty) Internal Desktop 3.5" hard drive. (Amazon screenshot in the breakdown below.)

OS: Windows 7
CPU: AMD Athlon X4 860K
Hard Drive Specs: https://imgur.com/Kn0oA3Y
Amazon Listing: https://imgur.com/I0UVrJv
C: Drive Specs: https://imgur.com/3Mj5gLA
Disk Management: (my drive is Disk 0) https://imgur.com/Z26Xebt

=============

When I first installed the drive, I had ~1.5 GB of space. That was.... No. No! So, I immediately did a Disk Clean Up and cleaned up any system files that I didn't need. That's how I ended up with the "Free Space" I have now. I was thinking about reconnecting the WD Black (it works; it's just dying) for my hard drive and then format the Seagate. I think that might work, but what do y'all think?

I've also just emailed Seagate support, but they more than likely won't get back to me until tomorrow. The hard drive is working great right now, but I absolutely need more than 8.33 GB of space to work.
 
Solution
From your disk management, which was cut off, it looks like you have a 250 or 256 GB drive as Disk 0 (not the 2TB one), and the other drive is partitioned in two with 1 TB capacity in each partition. You may want to post the FULL disk management screenshot instead of just it cut off so we can see everything.

Also if the drive is in the enclosure, they often have issues when removed. I got a 3 TB drive once, took it out, and it would not be seen as that in my computer, I could only set it up as a 2 TB drive. Put it back in the enclosure, it was back to 3 TB again as it should.
Does that drive qualify as having a capacity larger than 2.2 TB ? If so, is it GPT partitioned ?
In order for windows 7 to fully support a storage device that has a capacity exceeding 2 TB, the drive must be initialized by using the GPT partitioning scheme. Also, one must install the latest storage drivers from your storage controller manufacturer.

If the board uses UEFI and the disk has GPT, or if the drive is < 2.2TB using BIOS and MBR then definitely try the reboot / format .
BTW, some comments on these drives suggest they may not be new !

EDIT

Here is a Toms discussion on point.
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1709851/2tb-hdd-recognized-232gb-windows-full-2tb-bios.html

The Best Answer would appear to be :

The 232GB capacity is consistent with a 2TB drive that has been initialised in an external enclosure that has a 4Kbyte sector size.

232 gigabytes x (4096 / 512) = 1 992 864 825 344 bytes

http://www.google.com/search?q=232+gigabytes+x+(4096+/+512)+in+bytes

If you've never installed the HDD in an enclosure, and if was delivered with a 232GB partition, then a previous purchaser may have returned it to the vendor
 
Hello, dear friends.

So, I think I have a couple of solutions about the size problem. I will add that the HDD did come with an enclosure. So, thankfully, there's nothing to worry about with that.

One is that Seagate emailed me about the drive problem, which I will share with you all here. http://i64.tinypic.com/2itqv6o.jpg (I'll switch to imgur when the page wants to act right again.)

Another is that I think that my drive is actually Disk 2 in my Disk Management system. I might just have to move my C: drive to this disk, and that should solve the problem.

Unfortunately, I can't prove either solution because I've run into a new problem. I restarted my computer on Sunday and now I'm having a "BootMGR is missing" issue. When I solve that, then I'll be able to give or check off a proper solution to this problem.
 
From your disk management, which was cut off, it looks like you have a 250 or 256 GB drive as Disk 0 (not the 2TB one), and the other drive is partitioned in two with 1 TB capacity in each partition. You may want to post the FULL disk management screenshot instead of just it cut off so we can see everything.

Also if the drive is in the enclosure, they often have issues when removed. I got a 3 TB drive once, took it out, and it would not be seen as that in my computer, I could only set it up as a 2 TB drive. Put it back in the enclosure, it was back to 3 TB again as it should.
 
Solution