Above 2TB Hard Drive w Legacy BIOS

[Arisaig21]

Installed an 8TB Seagate HD but it incorrectly reads as 1.3TB.  Can successfully install HD above 2TB or limited to 2TB by Legacy BIOS.  Cannot find any driver or BIOS updates to resolve the problem.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

You would only be able to use the drive as a storage drive if you can format the drive in GPT.

You would not be able to use any drive>2 TB as a boot drive in your PC.

[Arisaig21]

Thanks very much!  Booting computer with an SSD drive.  8TB HD has been formated as an GPT NTFS data only drive and shows it as only 1.3TB in Windows file manager.   HP diagnostics shows HD storage as 1.3TB capacity for SCSI Disk Device and 7.45TB capacity HD.  HD storage capacity being limited by the SCSI Disk Device??

Storage 3

Model  ST8000DM 004-2CX188 SCSI Disk Device

Firmware version  0001

Serial Number

Capacity  1308.03 GB

Drive Self-Test support  False

Bytes per Sector  512

Storage 6

Model  ST8000DM004-2CX188

Firmware version  0001

Bytes per Sector  512

Serial Number  

Capacity  7452.04 GB

Drive Self-Test support  True

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

It was my understanding that even with a legacy BIOS, if the drive was formatted in GPT all the space would be seen and used by Windows.

Since it is not, unfortunately I would have no idea why it isn't and there would be no way to make it so.

This HP whitepaper even indicates that the drives total space would show up if formatted in GPT as a storage drive--page 4.

Main title here (hp.com)

[DGroves]

if you are willing to place the drive in a external USB enclosure then you should be able to access the full capacity (it may need reformatting using windows disk manager) as the external usb drive enclosure will have custom firmware that internally remaps the drive capacity into a format that will work on most old/new computers