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Adding a WD 2TB SATA hard Drive to my E521
I'm having a problem installing a new WD 2TB SATA 3Gb/s Hard drive 64 MB 7200RPM 3.5in Caviar Black
to my Dimension E521 (32 bit Vista Home Premium SP2).
Windows Disk Management recognises it correctly and initialises the disk okay.
But here's the problem - I can only format 1Tb of the 2Tb.
With one 2Tb partition the formatting freezes after 1Tb, and if I partion into 2 then it still will only format 1Tb total and then the formatting freezes at that point.
A formatted partition of less than 1Tb is accepted and fully usable, but I just can't access the remaining 0.5Tb.
My Dell account recommended this hard drive as an upgrade compatible.
and according to the Dell website I've got the latest BIOS (1.1.11)
So is Vista intrinsically incapable of using the full capacity of a disk over 1Tb, or (more likely !) am I missing something ? Can this problem be solved if I upgrade to Windows 7?
BJ2011
5 Posts
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March 1st, 2011 19:00
Awesome, I went and downloaded Version 15.24 - XP32 - GPU Driver included
and it formatted my 2 TB drive in seconds.
Thanks and have a great day.
rdunnill
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February 28th, 2011 20:00
I had a 1.5tb fully recognized under Vista (64-bit) so I doubt that's the problem. My 2350 (with third party SATA adapter) runs Windows 7 and fully uses a 2tb drive. I can't say if your problem would go away with an upgrade to 7, but it wouldn't hurt.
BJ2011
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February 28th, 2011 20:00
Correction I cannot access the remaining 1TB
jackshack
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February 28th, 2011 21:00
You are most likely having a problem with the SATA driver for your chipset. Here is a page from Seagate outlining the difficulty and explaining what you will need to do: Large SATA Drives (greater than 1.1 TB) Will Not Completely Format. This problem occurs only with nVidia chipsets and Windows Vista.
EDIT: Corrected to indicate the SATA driver is the problem. The E521 uses an nVidia 6150LE chipset and the original SATA driver for Windows Vista has a 1.1 TB limit on hard drive capacity.
jackshack
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March 1st, 2011 19:00
You are very welcome. I wish you the best of luck.