New 3TB HDD, can see full 2.7TB in Linux and Windows, but shows up as 801.6GB in BIOS

4

I recently purchased a Seagate Barracuda 3TB drive (ST3000DM001). After installing it, my BIOS recognized it but reported the size as 801.6gb. I went ahead and booted into Linux anyway (Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit).

Linux saw it as a 2.7TB. Following some online instructions (don't have the link handy, unfortunately), it looks liked converting this drive to GPT was recommended. So I used gparted to do that, then formatted it to NTFS also using gparted. (I'm using NTFS because my machine is daul-boot and I want to have access to the drive in Windows too).

I rebooted to Windows (Windows 7 64-bit), and Windows also sees the drive with 2.7TB free. Everything seems to be working fine.

The only issue is that my BIOS is still reporting the drive as 801.6GB. My motherboard is an ASRock 770 Extreme3 and BIOS is the latest version.

Since everything seems to be working with the new drive anyway, I'm hoping that the fact that the BIOS is reporting the wrong size is not an actual problem. But honestly, I don't really know. Anyone out there more familiar with this know if this could potentially cause any problems in the future? Any way to get the BIOS to report the correct size?

Ben Lee

Posted 2012-03-20T01:10:09.650

Reputation: 75

If your bios supports caching, try wiping the cache through the BIOS settings. It may have associated the size with the drive UID. – John – 2012-03-20T01:35:58.260

@John, good thought, but my bios doesn't support caching. – Ben Lee – 2012-03-20T01:45:45.627

If it's not in the settings, try removing the small coincell battery on the MoBo with the power off, waiting a minute, then replacing it and powering back on. EDIT: ah, nvm then, sorry. I'll see what else I can think up. – John – 2012-03-20T01:46:21.853

Answers

5

It's not a problem. BIOS needs to be able to see enough of the beginning of the drive to bootstrap the system into whatever operating system you're running. After that, BIOS doesn't matter for disk access.

Kyle Jones

Posted 2012-03-20T01:10:09.650

Reputation: 5 706

1

You might check if there is a BIOS update to fix the issue, but if you aren't booting from the drive, it isn't really worth worrying about. If you did need to boot from the drive, and there wasn't a bios fix, you could still work around the problem by placing a boot partition in the first 800mb, and then once the OS is up and running, you can store your data files on the rest of the drive.

psusi

Posted 2012-03-20T01:10:09.650

Reputation: 7 195

Asked: 2012-03-20T01:10:09.650

Viewed: 2 636 times

Active: 2012-03-20T04:19:25.567