Seagate 5TB Drive showing up as 561GB

[Captain_Reginald]

Hello LTT Forum,

 

I've searched and searched this issue online and nothing I've tried has worked. At this point I'm just getting confused so I thought I'd ask here.

 

Here's the problem:

 

So I just bought some used drives off of Facebook Marketplace. One of them is a 5000GB drive from Seagate that was manufactured in late 2014. The previous owner didn't format it before giving it to me and so I thought I'd go ahead and do that myself as there were some files on it. Initially, it was showing up correctly as 4000-whatever actual GB. When I tried to quick format it from File Explorer, it kept getting stuck and throwing errors (just that it couldn't complete, no particular error code - trying to format other disks actually had the same problem of getting stuck). Well, I got smart and went over to disk partition manager instead and straight up deleted the volume. Upon trying to create a new partition, Disk 2 now shows up as only 561 GB instead of 5 TB which is obviously 1/8th of what it should be. Going between GPT and MBR makes no difference.

 

All of the forum posts everywhere else just have me confused. I've read of people fixing this by updating the sata controller drivers, but I have no idea how to find the correct driver to download and install as device manager says the driver is already up to date and doesn't give me any info about the hardware.

 

My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 3600 on an MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max motherboard. I'm running Windows 10.

 

Any help with this would be seriously appreciated - my brain is fried from trying so many different angles with no results.

[Anders Q Liden]

I seriously think that the disk is faulty, especially if you got all those errors when trying to format it the first time.

I would focus on trying to check the disk:
https://www.diskpart.com/windows-10/bad-sector-repair-windows-10.html

[Captain_Reginald]

58 minutes ago, Anders Q Liden said:

I seriously think that the disk is faulty, especially if you got all those errors when trying to format it the first time.

I would focus on trying to check the disk:
https://www.diskpart.com/windows-10/bad-sector-repair-windows-10.html

That's definitely not the problem - this isn't something that's so uncommon that you can't find any info about it and people have gotten their drives to show up correctly after having this issue. I just can't seem to solve it myself for whatever reason...

 

That said, I did take your advice and ran a scan of the disk just in the off chance that you are right. No errors were returned though. Everything seems to be operating fine, the size just isn't coming back correctly.

[Captain_Reginald]

So upon further inspection, apparently the USB device I was using to read the hard drive doesn't support capacities that high. I've switched over to a newer one that sees the entire size of the drive, but now we have a new problem - all of the options to partition or do anything with the volume are grayed out in Disk Management. Trying to do the same thing with parted on Ubuntu Linux responds that /dev/sdc isn't a valid location - except I can see it in the list of disks... how does that make sense?

 

Any ideas for now I can get past all this? Did I break it by messing with the partition in a device that doesn't support it?

[Captain_Reginald]

10 minutes ago, Captain_Reginald said:

So upon further inspection, apparently the USB device I was using to read the hard drive doesn't support capacities that high. I've switched over to a newer one that sees the entire size of the drive, but now we have a new problem - all of the options to partition or do anything with the volume are grayed out in Disk Management. Trying to do the same thing with parted on Ubuntu Linux responds that /dev/sdc isn't a valid location - except I can see it in the list of disks... how does that make sense?

 

Any ideas for now I can get past all this? Did I break it by messing with the partition in a device that doesn't support it?

Alrighty, I solved it! Took some problem solving, but I was able to clean the drive with DiskPart in command prompt, create a new primary partition, and then format the drive as NTFS with Disk Management. Now the drive is showing up as blank with 4.54 TB of space in file explorer! Woohoo! 

 

It was frustrating to have to go to so many different places for help and then put them all together, but it's definitely satisfying to solve an issue like this yourself. Thanks anyway, guys.

[Anders Q Liden]

12 hours ago, Captain_Reginald said:

That's definitely not the problem - this isn't something that's so uncommon that you can't find any info about it and people have gotten their drives to show up correctly after having this issue. I just can't seem to solve it myself for whatever reason...

 

That said, I did take your advice and ran a scan of the disk just in the off chance that you are right. No errors were returned though. Everything seems to be operating fine, the size just isn't coming back correctly.

Ok, great news. Super cool that you found it.