3TB - now suddenly shrunk to 800GB

[BikeDude]

I've been using my 3TB Seagate ST3000DM for over a year with Win7 x64.

Then one morning I power up and my drive is gone. Disk Management thinks my drive is a 800GB Uninitialized volume.

I removed the drive from my computer, put it into a USB2 cradle and ran gdisk:

Disk 3:: 5860533168 sectors, 2.7 TiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 5325029A-3C3C-41FE-A8A2-B1A674C11B47
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1565565838
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 34 262177 128.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved part
2 264192 5860532223 2.7 TiB 0700 Basic data partition
121 6878660562991406825 4577042414194828711 7.0 ZiB FFFF ôÙ¯Ë*zWÛY{®QÝåÚÎtöø>N=
122 5284581992792709097 4432073046536084950 7.6 ZiB FFFF ÚUÈ'ñ{@×─£┤ÝÉÖc=ß×N-/tO
123 8303544037733460845 5506391244847035732 6.8 ZiB FFFF ÞØZºÁMJ3(z²U§·¥$m·ı#↨U®
124 16905117212603940977 8497723957733362077 4.4 ZiB FFFF ┤`Û*jSokÌUUªz]─{ı}ûP?¿o
125 6295956367485359541 11211373534731256917 2.1 ZiB FFFF ╗òJ5VEıT}}Í ¬VÏc-wW◄=R±
126 6300360612397820596 4046870402744957674 7.0 ZiB FFFF _]ënêmë¦N█}ı·Q[]_Í║u╗jÊ
127 14483478072398312462 5818837272184272927 4.2 ZiB FFFF õÊrn*Z☺B¸0d┼
òM28 15619833484525747870 6685076147963520123 4.1 ZiB FFFF ¯Ãr4█▼¶l∟☼IIOÆÌ÷'ðtÈ

The first two partition entries seem ok to me. At least the size seem reasonable...

I guess I could delete the invalid partitions, but this doesn't smell right to me. I think my first goal should be to get my PC to recognise the drive as a 3TB drive when I hook it up with SATA. I would be more confident to proceed from there.

Any ideas why a ASUS P6T SE motherboard running Win7 x64 suddenly fails to recognise a 3TB secondary drive? I do not recall having done anything special to get the drive going in the first place.

 

[Elixer]

Assuming no BIOS update was done, and it worked before, but not now, the only thing that may work is swap SATA cables, or ports or, if the BIOS can't see it as a 3TB drive, then, your only other option is to clear CMOS, and that might work.
A very long shot might be to try another PSU for the HD.
This could also mean that the 3TB HD is about to die, and is being very flaky right now.

 

[Cerb]

I'll take a gander that it was seen as 800.98GB, right (3TB-2TiB)?

That would lead me to believe some software error somewhere...but where? In the SATA firmware? In the SATA drivers? In the drive firmware (or corruption/loss of metadata for the drive firmware)? In some dark corner of Windows? Or, it could be a hardware error in the SATA controller, or somewhere amongst the HDD controller's parts.

Too much to speculate on, IMO, but it's definitely not good.

 

[wand3r3r]

~4 Platters, 3 aren't recognized? RMA time possibly?

Check the above first though.

 

[BikeDude]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

Cerb, Testdisk shows:
Disk /dev/sdb - 801 GB / 746 GiB - ST3000DM 001-9YN166

I briefly tried hooking the drive up to a computer at work using SATA. That computer is able to see a 3TB drive, albeit an empty one. (i.e. same result as when I hook up the drive using USB to my own rig) The feeling that something is seriously amiss is hard to shake.

Elixer, I tried swapping SATA cables. My SATA optical drives, my SATA SSD and my old SATA HDD still works. I will try to clear the CMOS later, but AFAIK the Windows driver isn't supposed to query the BIOS much. I've read that most non-UEFI motherboards won't boot from a 3TB partition, but that never bothered me because I boot from the SSD. You are probably thinking along the right lines, but I need one more nudge in the right direction.

wand3r3r, the shop I bought it from says the same thing. I would like to get to the bottom of this though, because AFAICT the drive seems fine unless someone told you it used to contain lots of data. What would stop them from reformatting the drive and simply send it back saying it is OK? I can do that much myself...

 

[glugglug]

I have a P6T Deluxe V2, which is pretty similar to what you are using, and had problems where it would freeze up accessing the data right around the 2TB limit when I hooked a 3TB drive to the eSATA port, which is off the Marvell controller. There may be a motherboard SATA port on the Marvell controller as well. Make sure you are using one of the ICH10R SATA ports instead.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Dude, you got a free 50.2 zebibytes. What are you complaining about?

 

[daLoungeLizard]

Similar problem here:

I have a 3TB Seagate HD partitioned in half (2 partitions approx. 1.3TB each) and formatted NTFS using GPT. It's been working fine for over a year until a couple of weeks ago. I had the drive connected to an older Win2003 server that recognized the physical drive as two drives and loaded a bunch of files onto one of the partitions. I went away for a while (on vacation), leaving the computer running and drives connected (so I could remote in, if needed - but never did), idle - everything seemed fine. Upon returning however a few days later, I found the computer had rebooted due to a power problem and it seemed my UPS did it's job correctly. But, there is now a big problem with my 3TB Hard Drive - it only shows one of the partitions as normal (partition 1); but the other partition (partition 2) in the Disk Manager shows up as RAW and Windows wants me to format it. Windows Drive Manager has the physical drive recognized as correct in size - BUT - TestDisk recognizes only 801GB / 746GB and GDISK also recognizes the physical drive as 746GB.

Gdisk Output:

Disk \\.\physicaldrive1: 1565565872 sectors, 746.5 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 7BB8BC84-909D-4ECC-8645-C4C029F87FAB
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1565565838
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 0 sectors (0 bytes)

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 34 262177 128.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved part
2 262178 2930397217 1.4 TiB 0700 Basic data partition
3 2930397218 5860532257 1.4 TiB 0700 Basic data partition

Recovery/transformation command (? for help): i
Partition number (1-3): 3
Partition GUID code: EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 (Microsoft basic data)

Partition unique GUID: 75F236CF-3EB5-4759-90B7-B120634EC0A5
First sector: 2930397218 (at 1.4 TiB)
Last sector: 5860532257 (at 2.7 TiB)
Partition size: 2930135040 sectors (1.4 TiB)
Attribute flags: 0000000000000000
Partition name: 'Basic data partition'

Recovery/transformation command (? for help): v

Problem: partition 2 is too big for the disk.

Problem: partition 3 is too big for the disk.

Warning! Secondary partition table overlaps the last partition by 4294966419 blocks!
You will need to delete this partition or resize it in another utility.

Caution: Partition 1 doesn't begin on a 8-sector boundary. This may
result in degraded performance on some modern (2009 and later) hard disks.

Caution: Partition 2 doesn't begin on a 8-sector boundary. This may
result in degraded performance on some modern (2009 and later) hard disks.

Caution: Partition 3 doesn't begin on a 8-sector boundary. This may
result in degraded performance on some modern (2009 and later) hard disks.

Consult http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/
for information on disk alignment.

Identified 3 problems!

Yeah - it's those 3 problems that have me concerned - especially where the "secondary partition table overlaps the last partition by 4294966419 blocks" - really concerned...

Then, to add insult to injury. I chose to reboot the machine and during boot, I guess the OS thought somehow the MFT was corrupt and ran CHKDSK. I had a sinking feeling about this... it had tons of issues - lots of "insufficient disk space to recover lost data" messages - I let it run for a few days before I killed the process. I figured it would take a year at the slow rate it was going and it wasn't doing any good by that point anyway. WTF??? Both recovery utilities think this drive is 746GB in size when Windows shows it correctly as a 3TB drive. I downloaded a couple of free GUI tools: PartitionGuru (free version) and OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro (free trial version) for a simple test to see what it can read and they also show the drive as 746GB. I figure this is the main culprit - even though Windows Drive Manager sees the drive as 3TB, all these kernel-level tools are not seeing it correctly.

The question now is - why did the second partition crap out after such a long time working fine? And - are the files recoverable on the "lost" partition? So far, nothing is reading the 2nd partition for the files. I assume it bit the dust when the 2Gb boundary got crossed and something got confused. I tried this drive on several different computers (and older Win2003 server, a Win7 laptop, and a Win8 laptop) all with exactly same results, but haven't hooked it up to my Linux workstation yet. I double-checked that all my computers are updated with the latest Intel drivers (though not sure about RST - I saw this as an issue on a couple of posts elsewhere - but I have no raid capability in the laptops and no need for RST as far as I can tell).

-- Da Lizard

 

[BikeDude]

Months have passed, and stuff happened.

I put the drive in a USB cradle and used photorec to recover my photos. After this I launched into Seatools which long test ended promptly with messages akin to
"Bad LBA: 587559889 Unable to repair"

So I RMA'ed the sucker. Funny thing: The new drive also gave me similar errors in the USB cradle. Seagate support told me that the Barracuda is an internal hard drive and hinted that a USB cradle was maybe not the best place for it. Given that the common denominator of the test errors was the said USB cradle I did not argue.

But the original problem remained. My ICH10R SATA controller still blocked out 2048 GB worth of disk space. SNAFU.

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218615en blames the old Intel driver, but I was unable to find any newer driver that would install itself willingly. The device IDs did not match up well. I was stuck at version 8.9.0.1023 (from June 2009) of iaStor.sys.

However, the Seagate article also mentioned their DiscWizard. Normally I abhor any computer related wizardry as I prefer to know what takes place under the hood. But the utility did the trick: Windows 7 again recognises that I have a 3TB drive (well, 2.7TB, but who is counting). I wish I knew exactly what it did. (did it install a driver? Will everything fall to pieces if I uninstall it? What happens if I install the OS afresh? And how did I manage to use the first drive for a year without this util?)

Seatools for DOS tests the drive OK.

In any case: Thanks for all the input guys.

 

[Cerb]

If you don't use RAID, you can set your SATA controller to MS' AHCI, set your SATA mode to AHCI in your BIOS, and not use Intel's driver at all.