Dimension 8300 support 3TB hard drive?

XP is dated and it's time to move on.

yes XP is dated, rdunhill, and if I could afford to upgrade my machines now I certainly would have.

The Family Pack will upgrade XP to Windows 7 for as little as $45 a seat.

when you try accessing the drive from another hard drive (either from a different computer or from a 3rd hard drive in the same computer).  In my case when I booted from a 3rd drive in the same computer, the 3 TB hard drive was at first not accessible.

I'm curious, what do you mean by "accessing the drive from another hard drive"?  At first I thought you might mean copying between the 3TB and another hdd.  But do you mean when another drive is the system drive?  (Of course having the 3TB drive be a system drive is an issue too with non-UEFI motherboards.)

Yes, I meant when another drive is the system drive.  I always put at least 2 hard drives in the desktop computers that I own and make sure Windows is in both of them.  In case the main one fails, I have a backup system drive that I can boot from and I can transfer the files from the failed drive into the backup drive.  I first tried making the 3 TB drive the backup system drive (I did this by installing the recovery disks into it).  Alot of things happened but the bottom line is that it did not work the way I wanted.  At first it did boot up fine when I set it as the system drive but when I make the original drive the system drive, it asked me to format parts of the 3 TB drive to access it and doing that damaged the Windows that I had just installed onto it, preventing it from booting up, and thus eliminating its possibility to be a backup drive.

I do have a 3rd hard drive handy, so I planned to put the backup Windows into that drive instead and just make the 3 TB drive a data drive.  After I put Windows into the 3rd hard drive, boot from it, and tried to access the 3 TB drive, it was asking me to format a 2.2 TB partition in order to access it.  So the bottom line is that I could access it with the original hard drive as the system drive, but not with another drive as the system drive - probably similar to your experience when putting the drive in another computer.  So if something happens to the OS of your original hard drive, then you might lose most of the content of the 3 TB drive.  I guess some people could live with that but to me that's an unacceptable risk.  It's sad because this drive got high reviews - none of them addressed this issue which is why I'm glad I read this thread.

Did you get a 2 TB drive instead?  If so, how did that work out?

This is absolutely unbelievable but what I had feared the most has just happened - I just lost important data that I put on that 3 TB hard drive!  It was data from the 3rd hard drive.  I transferred it to the 3 TB drive because I knew I had to format the 3rd hard drive in order to install the recovery disks into it.  I was planning to put them back.  This was worse than I had ever thought!    

It seems that simply installing the Seagate Disk Wizard on the 3rd hard drive made the 3 TB drive unaccessible even from the original hard drive!  In Disk Management I see that the 2.2 TB partition has changed from NTFS to RAW.  When I try to access it, it says "You need to format the disk in drive D: before you can use it.  Do you want to format it?"  Do you think there's any way I can get the data back?  Any suggestion?  I'll wait for a reply before I return this wretched thing.  I have until Dec. 27.

First, in the future instead of having multiple system drives, you might try what I do:  Every night I make a Norton Ghost image of all my hard drives to another hard drive.  i.e.  I have twice as many drives as I store data on, and any failure simply requires swapping in a new drive and restoring the previous night's image (either Base or Incremental [daily changes]).  As soon as I found I could not "see" a 3TB drive (which was to be a backup destination) from Ghost's boot CD, I knew that meant I couldn't use it and ended up returning it without every losing anything.

As for your problem, I'm not completely sure I understand your situation.  And I used Hitachi's lousy kluge, not Seagate's lousy kluge, so all I can do is say that...

With Hitachi's lousy kluge, the ONLY way to access data on one's 3TB, is to boot from the system drive one installed their kluge on.  If you can't do that somehow, perhaps you are hosed.  I'd check with Seagate techsupport for advice, too.  Good luck Outlier!!

3TB is not ready for prime time and not yet native to windows and most bios.

I tried system restore but there were no restore points created.  Anyway I found that I had made a backup of a good portion of the data some time ago so it's not as bad as I thought, I still lost a lot of data though. 

Anyway, that's a good idea about making images of your hard drive every night.  However, I don't accumulate that much data in a single day to make it worth it to do that.  Also, I don't think I would have the discipline to do it every night. 

My situation is pretty much the same as yours:

With Hitachi's lousy kluge, the ONLY way to access data on one's 3TB, is to boot from the system drive one installed their kluge on.  If you can't do that somehow, perhaps you are hosed.

I was worse than hosed.  I could originally access the data when booting from the system drive that I installed the Seagate Disc Manager on.  After trusting that at least this would be a constant, I put important data on the 3 TB drive temporarily.  Then afterwards it didn't allow access.  So it was like being led on before being dumped.  I believe this occurred after I installed Seagate Disc Manager onto another hard drive (which I had set as the other system hard drive).  The act of installing the software must have changed something in the 3 TB hard drive (almost like formatting it).

The thing is, this drive would be perfectly fine for people who don't care about transferring it to another computer at a later date.  Like you mentioned, it does work with the system drive that their software was installed on (in that case the only issue is that it got divided into two partitions).  It's only when you want to access it from other drives that problems arise (which will happen when you want to install it on a new computer).  I guess the manufacturers never bothered testing that part out.

I do not see Rosewill eSATA card listed as a card that has native windows 7 drivers.

The other "issue" is that it requires 64 bit os to be the boot drive.

It may be with WIN7 SP1 that the

• RC-216 can connect 2 SATA 3G and 2 ATA 133 HDD max.
• You can construct RAID 0/1/0+1/JBOD with 4 HDD.
• If you don’t set any RAID to this card, it will work as an unRAID card to hook up more HDD to your system.
• Rosewill Magic Switch can allow you connect 2 SATA HDD totally.
• You can active only two SATA channels either from 2 external or 2 internal SATA ports.
• Compliant with one-lane 2.5Gb/s PCI Express specification
• Compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 specification
• Supports Native Command Queue (NCQ) on SATA ports
• Provides three independent channels to connect two SATA and one PATA hard disk drive
• Supports up to UDMA6 transfer mode of PATA
• Supports up to 4 storage device connection

* HDD Controllers are capable to support all HDD sizes, but different OS may limited the HDD sizes that can be supported.

For example, XP 32-bit supports only up to 2TB.

* This Model supports Optical Drive (both IDE and SATA CD/DVD-ROM including Blu-ray drives.) 

* Please avoid using "Green" drives to build the RAID. These types of drives have slower spin up time and tend to enter power saving mode aggressively. The RAID controller would assume the drives as either dropped or damaged because of time out, and the whole RAID set will become degraded or even unusable.

3TB is not ready for prime time and not yet native to windows and most bios.

By the way, all this time I have been talking about an internal hard drive, not external.  (yes it's possible to put 3 internal hard drives into the XPS 8300).  It's tough to pinpoint exactly what the cause is, but I can tell you that when I first put the 3 TB hard drive into the computer, the BIOS recognized all 3 TB in the drive whereas Windows only recognized a portion of it - installing Seagate Disk Wizard made Windows recognize all the 3 TB (although in two partitions).  Here is a helpful page from the Seagate website where they list 3 TB drive issues with Windows:  seagate.custkb.com/.../search.jsp

I should also add that Dell does not sell any of their XPS 8300 packages with single 3 GB drives.  Their premium fully loaded XPS 8300 packages comes with 1.5 TB total, but through two 750 GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration. 

I do not see Rosewill eSATA card listed as a card that has native windows 7 drivers.

I didn't bother to look -- immediately upon bootup, Windows automatically downloaded and installed the driver. :)

The other "issue" is that it requires 64 bit os to be the boot drive.

Only if it is to be used as a boot drive; 32-bit Vista and 7 will recognize greater-than-2tb data drives.

By the way, all this time I have been talking about an internal hard drive, not external.

I can check if a SATA-to-eSATA adapter bracket will work and get back to you.

    "I don't think I would have the discipline to do it every night. "

It happens automatically, it's scheduled.

    "I was worse than hosed."

I'm so sorry, man!