please help me fix this drive that is acting strange

[theviztastic]

Ive just installed a new hard disk into my computer, its a 4tb seagate. its presenting as 2tb, and wont let me make a partition any bigger than 2tb.

 

ive formatted it through the diskpart cmd. 

 

i dont know what else to do, ive spent all day on this!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Switch the drive to GPT, that seems like the MBR limit. Right click where it says Disk 2 and select convert to GPT.

[theviztastic]

26 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Switch the drive to GPT, that seems like the MBR limit. Right click where it says Disk 2 and select convert to GPT.

I've tried that, this is what I get. Can't figure out what's going on

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, theviztastic said:

I've tried that, this is what I get. Can't figure out what's going on

DO the convert thing in the gui, no need for disk management here.

 

What disk did you select?

 

And you probably want to stop the format too.

[theviztastic]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

DO the convert thing in the gui, no need for disk management here.

 

What disk did you select?

 

And you probably want to stop the format too.

Seems to work in the gui, but its now presenting as 4 drives. Each drive with the red dot next to it is the one in question. It never let's me create a partition bigger than 2 tb?!

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, theviztastic said:

Seems to work in the gui, but its now presenting as 4 drives. Each drive with the red dot next to it is the one in question. It never let's me create a partition bigger than 2 tb?!

Did you give the system a reboot after? Id also be tempted to test it in a linux live disk and wipe it in there.

[theviztastic]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Did you give the system a reboot after? Id also be tempted to test it in a linux live disk and wipe it in there.

Restart has cleaned it up somewhat, but its still splitting the disk in two, with one half not accessible at all. I'm/it's not formatting anything either. Don't know why it says that it is

[Mavendow]

This looks like a drive with hacked firmware. It's showing 4tb but may actually have only 2tb of physical platter space. The fact you found this out now is probably a good thing since these hacked firmware will start overwriting other data once you put more than 2tb of data in total across the two partitions. Although it looks like whatever hack they tried to do isn't working very well.

[theviztastic]

1 minute ago, Mavendow said:

This looks like a drive with hacked firmware. It's showing 4tb but may actually have only 2tb of physical platter space. The fact you found this out now is probably a good thing since these hacked firmware will start overwriting other data once you put more than 2tb of data in total across the two partitions.

The drive looks completely legit to be fair. Seller has indicated they're happy to refund me if I can't get it working right. I'm gonna keep at it as if rather the drive then the money back

[Mavendow]

1 minute ago, theviztastic said:

The drive looks completely legit to be fair. Seller has indicated they're happy to refund me if I can't get it working right. I'm gonna keep at it as if rather the drive then the money back

The factories in China make two lines of product: one for the company, and one for the factory manager to sell on the side. Sometimes the ones sold on the side are defectives thrown out by the parent company. So, naturally they will appear physically identical to the real thing. However, the firmware is hacked to override the error checks like SMART and present the drive as fully functional to the OS even if it's not.

[theviztastic]

17 minutes ago, Mavendow said:

The factories in China make two lines of product: one for the company, and one for the factory manager to sell on the side. Sometimes the ones sold on the side are defectives thrown out by the parent company. So, naturally they will appear physically identical to the real thing. However, the firmware is hacked to override the error checks like SMART and present the drive as fully functional to the OS even if it's not.

Yeah, point taken. I think I'll have to take the drive back to the lad. Some one else where pointed out the sizes it's reporting are strange, even when combined. Honestly, I think it's a bad drive rather than a hacked one. Probably should've mentioned it's second hand, but thats my hunch anyway

[Mavendow]

2 minutes ago, theviztastic said:

Yeah, point taken. I think I'll have to take the drive back to the lad. Some one else where pointed out the sizes it's reporting are strange, even when combined. Honestly, I think it's a bad drive rather than a hacked one. Probably should've mentioned it's second hand, but thats my hunch anyway

It could be a bad drive. That's a very odd failure mode for a bad drive though, since it implies half of the platters aren't responding. Usually a bad drive is all or nothing.

[theviztastic]

On 1/16/2022 at 8:44 PM, Mavendow said:

It could be a bad drive. That's a very odd failure mode for a bad drive though, since it implies half of the platters aren't responding. Usually a bad drive is all or nothing.

Just to tie this up in case anyone suffers the same as issue I have, I'm using a sas pcie card, turns out that will truncate any drive larger than 2tb, down to 2tb.

 

I've wasted probably 20 hours on this now, ffs