Unable to allocate 750Gb on brand new seagate desktop hard drive

[Larhalt]

hi Guys! i just did something really stupid and feel desperate, I just bought a brand new Seagate Backup 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive (STDT3000100) and just received it today; the first thing I think on doing was a recovery disk for windows, stupid me tought it would create only a folder with the recovery, but no it formatted the whole disk to Fat32 and only showed 32Gb of capacity!! now, that is not the problem (i'm not that stupid), I went to disk manager and deleted that partition and created back again a NTFS, but now it only allowed me to do it for 2Tb!!! and have 750gb unusable.. i've tried everything but I can't use it, not to enlarge the current partition or to create a new one! what can I do??

 

[NormH]

delete that partition and expand the other... then shrink the other and greate new partition.

 

[Paul NZ]

Thats what can happen if you dont format it in GPT. Since its over 2.1/2.2 TB you will lose disk space.

But in order to format it in GPT, the system needs to support UEFI

 

[Larhalt]

Thats what can happen if you dont format it in GPT. Since its over 2.1/2.2 TB you will lose disk space.

But in order to format it in GPT, the system needs to support UEFI

Hi Paul! that seems to be the thing to do, do you know if I can do GPT format using disk tools like Disc Wizard from Seagate or partition magic? I'm not sure that my PC support UEFI but I'm almost sure it should, I built it a year ago and has a Z87 gigabyte mobo and win 8.1 64 bits

the only thing that worries me is that I have never done anything uefi-related, I just know that it is something that has to do with the bios and i'm afraid I might fuck up the disk even more (or mess with my other internal disks), how risky is this? that's why I'd rather use a third party software than having to mess with changes on the bios start up or something like that

P.S. I don't really need the 3 TB partition, i I could just recover those 750GB I'll be more than happy to have them as a different partition, i don't care 🙁

 

[Paul NZ]

I would say it does support UEFI. But is UEFI and secureboot enabled in the BIOS?

You could try this program http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/resize-gpt-disk-partition.htm

 

[Larhalt]

Hi Paul!

I got a reply from Seagate support and I was able to solve this I'm going to paste the reply here in case somebody else has this same problem (I was even able to restore to full capacity an old 500gb disk that I used on an xbox360 and only showed 320 gb ever since thanks a lot for your help!!

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

I understand you formatted your drive and now it doesn't allow you to use its full capacity. I'm happy to assist you.

You did the smart thing, by trying to format this drive in order to restore its full capacity. However, there is a limitation on some computers that don't allow to format 2TB and above drives as MBR-NTFS. In this case, you can use GPT instead. Here are some instructions to reformat your drive and get the full capacity in one partition:

First, you will need to put the files on this hard drive somewhere else before proceeding, because they will be deleted.

*** Remember that removing, deleting, erasing, formatting or partitioning your drive will permanently destroy your important data (pictures, videos music and documents), which Seagate cannot attempt to recover without cost to you. ***

Please proceed to connect your hard drive to the computer, and check what number the drive is detected as, in your list of disks in your Disk Management utility.

Within Disk Management this drive should show in your list of disks in the lower portion of Disk Management (Disk 1,2 3 etc). Take note of the disk number for the drive. You will need it shortly.

1) Go to DOS command line:
-Go to the Search option on your Windows 8 OS, then type "cmd" and press Enter.

2) In the command line, type:
DiskPart
and press Enter.

3) Type:
list disk
and press Enter to show all disks in this machine.

4) Figure out which disk you want to erase - it will be identified with a number.
Then type:
select disk X
where “X” is the number of the disk you want to erase. This will set the focus to the specified drive.
For example:
select disk 2

5) Type:
clean
and press Enter to erase the disk.

6) Go back to Disk Management. You should see that the disk is "Unallocated" now.
Right-click on "Not initialized" and choose "Initialize Disk". Make sure you select "GPT" when Initializing the disk.

Then the drive should be ready to partition and format.

7) Now right-click on the "Unallocated" area.
Select "New Simple Volume or New Partition".
Agree with everything until you see this:

Default
NTFS
New Volume = (name the drive whatever you like)

Then put a checkmark in the box "Perform a quick format".
Select Apply or Start.
When the drive is ready for use it will say NTFS - Healthy.

Please let us know if that helped.

For additional assistance, feel free to contact us at: www.seagate.com/about/contact-us/technical-support/


Regards,

John
Seagate Support

 

[Paul NZ]

Sweet good to hear you got it sorted !