I'm having trouble figuring out how to see and prepare the full 3 TB (or maybe I should say the 2.8 TB actual space) on my new SATA 3 TB drive.

I have an ASUS M3A motherboard and Phenom 9350e quad core processor. The board supports 4 SATA II devices. I current have two 750 GB SATA internal hard drives and a new SATA DVD burner. I've also just added a 3 TB Seagate Barracuda internal hard drive. The new drive is SATA III but I've been told that SATA III is backward-compatible with SATA II. I'm not sure if that's true so please tell me if it's not. I'm also not clear if I need an add-in card to adapt the new SATA III drive to work in my SATA II system.

I'm running Windows XP Pro with SP3. I've viewed Seagate's video on how to get an XP machine see all 3 TB of the drive via their Disk Wizard program. This is the link: http://support.seagate.com/rig...ard_Large_3TB_XP.htm.

I've downloaded the latest version of Disk Wizard but it seems to have changed considerably from the version used in the video. I can't get the current version to do the same things that they do in the (presumably older) version used in the video. All I can see is 746.50 GB; the rest of the 3 TB doesn't appear no matter what I do with Disk Wizard (Version 11). Windows also sees 746.50 GB. According to the video, the simple act of _installing_ the program (as opposed to using it to configure the drive) makes the rest of the space visible to Disk Wizard. So far, that has NOT been my experience. (I've even re-installed Disk Wizard but neither the typical nor the Complete installation behave any differently with regards to the new hard drive.)

Can anyone confirm that my system will work with that new 3 TB hard drive without modifications? Or will I need to upgrade the BIOS or get an add-in card to accomodate that new big drive?

Does anyone know how to coax the current version of Disk Wizard to do what they show in the video? Or how to find whatever version they are using in the video?

Any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.

I think that you have to configure the drive as a GPT format rather than NTFS. GPT disks can exceed 2.2TB whereas NTFS cannot.

source: http://www.overclock.net/t/115...dds/0_30#post_15521910



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Thanks for your assistance!

It looks like I've solved the problem. I viewed the video again and this time I noticed that the version of DiscWizard they installed was version 13, not the version 11 that I had downloaded. I googled again and found Version 13 semi-hidden away in a knowledgebase article about large drives. I downloaded and ran DiscWizard Version 13 and this time the screens matched the video and I was able to see and format all of the 3 TB drive.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't need to upgrade my OS beyond XP SP3 (32-bit), flash my BIOS, or obtain an add-in card to make my SATA III drive work in my SATA II system.

I may end up switching to a GPT approach and/or updating the OS to Windows 7 but, for now, this looks like it's going to work.

Thanks again!