I Just bought a 2TB drive, Win XP & BIOS only detect 1TB ....

Have you tried doing a format on it?

Windows XP doesn't support drives larger tha 128GiB; so you either do not have Windows XP or you have smaller disks. Probably you meant you have WinXP with ServicePack 1/2/3. Please be as accurate as possible, as all these details are pretty important.

You also didn't explain how you tried to view its capacity; where it says that its only 1TB.

to:buwish I went to windows disk management & I noticed that only 1tb was recognized, and the max size partition was 1TB so I didn't format

to:sub mesa
I have 2x 500gb installed already & I have service pack 3 ....

I viewed the capacity on windows disk management when I tried to format (I have Win XP SP3 Professional) and it was 1TB
so I went to check because I thought this was coming from the BIOS, and indeed the BIOS only recognized 1TB (1000GB it said )....

so do I need to fix how the BIOS sees the drive before trying to make it 2tb on windows
or can I bypass this ?

this is really frustrating

Could you post a screenshot of the drive in Disk Management?

Whatever your BIOS thinks, it should not affect functionality after you booted your OS. The BIOS only communicates with the disk during boot mode; until the OS can communicate with the disk directly.

You're absolutely sure its a 2TB drive right? You checked the label and it says 2TB?

screen shot here :

I bought a Hitachi HD32000, it's 2TB, I checked the label on the disk and it also says 2TB

"disk 1" is my stripe configuration, two 500gb disks in Raid 0
"disk0" is the supposedly 2TB disk.... I bought this disk for back up to upgrade to windows 7, win XP is really getting old and annoying

What is your motherboard, and to what SATA controller did you connect your 2TB disk? You say its recognized as 1TB by the BIOS also?

Could you take out that 2TB drive, look at the label, and verify it really is a 2TB drive? Maybe you just gotten a 1TB drive accidentally.

I concur^. You have 2 different things telling you this drive is a 1TB drive, both of which calculate the size independently.
The max size for a single volume in XP 32 bit is 2TB.

Well Windows XP RTM supports only 28-bit LBA meaning up to 128GiB (120GB in reality; commonly refered to as 137GB boundary).
Windows XP SP1 and later support 48-bit LBA meaning up to 2TiB (2TB in reality).
I assume either Vista or Windows 7 also supports 64-bit LBA (8192 Exbi Bytes i calculated   )

But as jitpublisher implied, there is no technical reason something would 'limit' the size to 1TB; as that's no boundary we are aware of.

If you are still checking this, the latest BIOS allows for recognition of 2TB drives.

If anyone is still checking this I would appreciate knowing what the solution was. I am running into the exact same problem...

When i first got a 2tb HDD for my xp/sp3 and formatted it, i also had this issue. i didnt find out the issue but i tried reformatting the drive again and now it has been working fine since.

I'm getting the same error, with this same model. My motherboard is ASUS P7P55D-E LX. BIOS only detects it as 1.0TB. And I've deleted all volumns on it, so it's raw... I don't know why it'll be recognised as 1TB... anyone resolved this?

Your Gigabyte BIOS (Award ?) is trying to grab about 2000 sectors at the top end of the drive in order to store a backup copy of itself for BIOS recovery purposes. To do this, it hides the copy in a Host Protected Area (HPA).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Protected_Area

... and ...

"Xpress Bios Rescue":
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/TechGuid...

Unfortunately, the BIOS code has a bug that causes it to miscalculate the size of the drive. In your case it reduces its capacity by 1TB, leaving you with only 1TB. A 1.5TB is reduced to 500GB, and a 1TB is reduced to 32MB.

You can restore the full native capacity of your drive using HDAT2 or HDD Capacity Restore Tool:

http://www.hdat2.com/
http://hddguru.com/software/2007.07.20-HDD-Capacity-Res...


See this thread for more information:
http://forum.hddguru.com/lost-partition-hitachi-1gb-hdt...

Other references:
http://tw2005.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/FileList/NewTec...
http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html#q1

BTW, to restore your partitions after repairing your drive, you could use TestDisk or Partition Find and Mount (freeware):

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
http://findandmount.com/

You are not the first with this problem. Asus have released some software for thier earlier boards but most of the time this can be fixed with BIOS updates.
Try this
http://event.asus.com/mb/2010/Disk_Unlocker/

I had a similar problem with a Hitachi HDS722020ALA 2TB SATA drive. I purchased 2 of them and one was DOA and the other was only detected as 1000GB in BIOS and by Windows (I tried multiple versions - XP SP3, Server 2008, Vista 32 & 64 bit, Windows 7 32 and 64 bit) all with no results in finding the full capacity of the drive. I RMAed both drives. One replacement was again DOA (wouldn't detect, wouldn't spin up) and the other was exhibiting the same 1000GB detection on BIOS and Windows (again, multiple versions). I returned the DOA drive for a full refund. The other 2TB drive that was detected as 1000GB I ended up formatting as 1000GB because I NEEDED it to backup another failing hard drive, so I had no choice. I successcully backed up my data and continued to use the 2TB drive as a 1TB drive for several months with no apparent problems.

I was able to purchase two 1.5TB drives and transferred the data off the 2TB drive without any problems. I then started to investigate the 2TB culprit. I tried 3 different computers with different chipsets and even used addon SATA controllers. All scenarios only detected the hard drive as 1000GB. I tried updating every driver and BIOS you could possibly imagine! After three months of no success with every avenue of support I tried, I disconnected the drive and gave up on it for a few days.

I then reconnected the hard drive to motherboard SATA controller and to my utter surprise IT WAS DETECTED AS 2TB! I did NOTHING but let the daRn thing sit! So, I formatted it as a 2TB drive and everything was FINE for 6 months! Then... I upgraded my computer. When I hooked up the 2TB drive, it was only detected as 1000GB again... Now, at this point, I had data copied over to it that I COULD NOT LOSE! So, after tireless searching on the Internet, I came across this thread and downloaded HDAT. I burned the image to a CD and booted the PC to that. I went into the HDAT program and found that 1000GB was "normal", not locked and 1000GB was in an HPA protected "locked" mode. I was VERY leary of doing anything as I didn't want to lose any data. But, at this point, I went for it. I REMOVED THE HIDDEN PROTECTED section of the HDD and rebooted.

The drive was detected as 2000GB in BIOS, and when I went into My Computer in Windows 7 64 Bit, ALL MY DATA WAS THERE! Life is good now.

I know I am late to the party on this one. Running XP with upgraded SP's. Installed a WD green SATA 2 TB drive, and Windows could only detect 1 TB in the management tool. Ran the HDD Capacity Restore (Thanks fzabkar), and it immeadiately found the missing space.

One thing to note is the tool can only be run on a single channel, so if you have another drive, or DVD running on the same channel, you will either have to update your BIOS, or disconnect the drive until the fix is complete.

I put a 2TB Hitachi (HDS5C3020ALA632) in to my 2003 SP2 machine. I did a full format via diskmgmt.msc and when complete 10 hours later I had a 1.81TB drive with 1.00 TB free. I did a chkdsk and it found nothing bad. I then did a BIOS upgrade on my Micro-Star MB with Phoenix BIOS and it had no affect . Finally I reformatted the drive by right-clicking on it in My Computer and selecting Quick Format. Wella - I had all 1.81TB available five seconds later.

Had a NEW Hitachi 2.0TB drive right out of the bag w/ this problem. HDAT fixed it. Awesome!