5TB drive seen as only 560GB - usual fixes don't work

I have a Dell XPS 8300 desktop, Windows 7/64, 12gb RAM. Boot drive is a 500GB SSD, and there's a 2TB SATA drive for data. I'm a photographer, so I need lots of data storage.

I just purchased a Toshiba MD04ACA500 5TB to use as a data drive (NOT boot).

My XPS 8300 can see the drive but insists it contains only 500GB of storage, not 5TB. I've done the following:

• Run Diskpart from a DOS window;
• Run Diskmgmt.msc;
• Run a third party partition tool; and
• I've also gone through Windows KB 2581408 procedure for adding a large drive.

No matter what I do, the drive is seen as only 560 GB.

Can I get this drive to work with Windows 7 and my Dell system? If so, how? If not, what's the cause?

Any help is much appreciated.
Ed

Have you tried downloading latest Intel RST driver?
Also download Intel Matrix storage manager and check is full capacity of 5TB hard disk drive shown (just to mention it's capacity will not exactly be 5TB).

All my chipsets are up to date. Any other ideas?

EdB said:

All my chipsets are up to date. Any other ideas?

Have you checked hdd capacity with Intel Matrix storage manage?Is proper value shown?

And also do what @jumanji suggested,but I think you can't use GPT as a boot drive (just to keep in mind).

Thanks for the replies, but I'm not getting anywhere.

• The drive is seen as a GPT drive. I've checked time and again with Disk Management, CMD, partition software, and all say it is a GPT drive of 561.40 GB in size. See attached JPG.
• I've run the procedure in the GPT tutorial literally a dozen times.
• What is Intel Matrix manage? When I google it, I find a download that won't run on my PC.
• I'm NOT trying to set up a boot drive! I'm a photographer, take lots of pics, and have them scattered all over the place. I thought this would be the solution.
• I've installed large drives on this and other systems - though not 5TB in size - with no problems.
• Question: checking the BIOS, I see drives are set up as ACHI, with the other option being RAID. Is that the problem.

Again, thanks for the help, you guys are the only ones trying to help (Toshiba and Dell: nada) But I'm not getting any work done. If I can't figure this out soon it'll have to go back.

Ed

In Start / Search type system information and click on the program to run it.

In System Information look at
System Summary > Components > Storage > Disks

Scroll to your 5TB HD.
Is the info displayed there correct ? (see screen print example below)

Your Disk Management screen print doesn't show all info.
Use this tutorial for how to properly post a maximized DM screen print with all fields re-sized so folks here can see everything:
Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

My screen print example is for a 1TB Samsung HD i use with this OS for data.

Of course, if it is a new drive and within vendor's return policy, returning it and getting another one will be the easiest solution.

On the other hand if you have the time and inclination to investigate what exactly is happening, I would suggest using bootice and examine it at sector level ( for 64bit version of Windows you have to download the 64 bit version of bootice)

Go through my post here Lost partitions! and post the second screenshot in it showing the Partition details. At the bottom you will also see the sector size and also the total number of sectors in the drive.

This is the picture of my HDD (external)



After examining if need be we can write zeros to all GPT data sectors and then format it as a GPT drive afresh.

We will be examining LBA 0, LBA 1, LBA 2 as well and some other sectors that hold the backup of LBA1 and LBA2. This is the GPT data.