Problems with Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB hard disk

[tmalin]

Hello,

My system before operations:
Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 with award BIOS
4 x Samsung T166 500GB hard disk
Windows XP SP 2

I added Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 to the system. BIOS recognized Seagate as a 1500 GB hard drive (if i remember correctly). I Initialized the hard disk in disk management, made one 500 GB partition and other one from the rest of the disk. I moved files from one of the Samsung drive (about 500 GB) to the Seagate’s larger partition. It took a few hours. Seagate’s temperature remained lower than the temperature of the Samsung drives (about 42 C). Everything seemed to work without problems.

Then I removed one of the Samsung drives. I had to disconnect them one by one, because I couldn’t know which one was the empty one. After I pinpointed the empty one, I removed it. After that BIOS auto detect says that Seagate is a 500 GB hard disk. Windows sees it as a 500 GB hard disk too, but it doesn’t detect any partitions in it.

How can I get my system to recognize Seagate disk properly?

[patio]

Right clik the drive in Disk Management and select Properties...
Report back with the details. or a screenshot.

[csown]

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I'm also having the same problem with the Seagate 7200.11 so maybe we can pool resources:

http://www.computing.net/answers/hardware/15tb-ext-drive-nuked/53465.html

OP: Did you also do a quickformat on the drive?

Bios reports 500GB only both from JBMicron RAID controller and main SATA.  Does it the same in both Gigabyte P35-DS3L and Asus P5B.  Here's a screenshot:



I should also note that the machine where this happened had one 500GB mirror, one 750GB stripe, and a single drive (5 drives in all).  I broke the stripe and added the 1.5 TB when this happened.

[tmalin]

ST31500341AS Properties looks like this:

General tab:
ST31500341AS

Device type:  Disk drives
Manufacturer: (Standard disk drives)
Location:     Location 0 (Secondary ATA Channel)

Device status:
This device is working properly.

Device usage:
Use this device (enable)

Policies tab:
(x) Optimize for performance

Volumes tab:
Disk: Disk 3
Type: Basic
Status: Online
Partition Style: Master Boot Record (MBR)
Capacity: 476961 MB
Unallocated space: 0 MB
Reserved space: 0 MB

Volumes:
(H:)  476961 MB

Driver tab:
Driver Provider: Microsoft
Driver Date: 2001-07-01
Driver Version 5.1.2535.0
Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows Publisher

[tmalin]

OP: Did you also do a quickformat on the drive?

Yes I did.

[mroilfield]

csown,

Even though you say you have the same problem I would suggest that you start your own thread on this. Since I doubt your comp specs exactly match that of the OP and I doubt that both of you have done the exact same things to your comps you might actual have different things causing each of your problems.

[csown]

Problem is resolved.  Tmalin: I hope this helps you resolve your problem too.

I contacted Seagate today through the live web support interface. It was surprisingly efficient and helpful. The support engineer told me that I needed to try resetting the max size in the firmware using SeaTools for DOS (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/).

It looks like there's a parameter for max size in the drive firmware, and somehow that got set to 500GB, possibly some interaction effect with the GigaByte BIOS. One of the advanced options in SeaTools DOS lets you set drive capacity arbitrarily or to max available. It's not available in SeaTools for Windows. If this procedure fails, then the drive would have to be sent back to Seagate.

After resetting the max size, I used Acronis to restore the partition and my data is back.

[patio]

Seagate has shipped a ton of these drives pre-set to these values...
And he was correct; the Windows SeaTools will not re-set the drive.
Good Info.

BTW Welcome Aboard ! !

[tmalin]

That solved my problems too. Now BIOS recognizes the drive correctly. The partitions and my data was intact.

Thanks for the help and information!

I wonder how many times I have to do that again. I have two more hard drives to remove and an other 1.5 TB Seagate drive to add to the system. 

[patio]

Might as well do it before the fact and save the grief...