Home Premium 32bit not recognising full capacity of 3tb drive

SMC said:

Hi. Please can someone (anyone!) help?

System specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit
Manufacturer: Medion
Motherboard MS-7501 version 2.1
Chipset AMD780G
Southbridge SMDSB700

Bios: American Megatrends Inc. version A7501MLN.10E (Date 04/10/2008).

I have recently purchased a new hard drive (Seagate Barracude 3tb ST3000DM001) that I intend to use for data storage, so this does not need to be bootable. I have connected this using an external enclosure via USB. My system will only show the drive as 746gb. I have downloaded Seagate disc wizard to use the extended capacity manager but this shows the following message: "The entire space is accessible: there are no harddisks with MBR partition style larger than 2 TB in your system or sector's size on your disk is larger than 512 KB. All hard drives can be managed by Add New Disk tool."

From reading more threads on this subject than is healthy, there appear to be "issues" with drives greater than 2tb. On these threads, some people have posted screen prints of the disk management screen, which usually shows the drive split into 2 partitions, with a 2.19tb unallocated partition. Mine does not. There is only 1 partition of 746gb.

Can anyone help me get my system to recognise this 3tb drive? At this stage I have no idea what the problem is. I am no computer expert but have usually managed to solve things using google and common sense. Is there a compatibility issue between either the bios / motherboard and 3tb drives in general?

SMC

Hi and welcome.
I have an external USB drive and it only supports drives up to 1 TB. This is most likely your issue. You need to connect the drive up to sata ports in your computer and partition it from there. Windows 7 32 bit can see drives that large but is not able to boot from them.