Formatting >1Tb

Berserker · 18 Aug 2007 at 10:39

I have one of these behemoths. They have a capacity of 1.5 TB or 1.36 TiB.

However, when I try to format it as a single giant NTFS partition, the format stops at 73%, or if I do a quick format, a later chkdsk stops at 73%. 73% of 1.36 TiB is 1.00 TiB. I suspect that's not a coincidence.

The drive itself is not faulty - I can read and write every single sector all the way to 1.36 TiB. It's just Windows/NTFS that doesn't want to know. Microsoft claim a practical limit of 2.00 TiB for NTFS (and a theoretical bigger limit), so it should be fine.

Is this a known problem? What am I doing wrong?

rpstewart · 18 Aug 2007 at 15:59

That's odd, NTFS should handle that easily - I've got a single 1.75Tb partition here, no problems.

Did you change the format settings away from the defaults?

Berserker · 18 Aug 2007 at 16:27

Nope. 4K cluster, no compression. Should I change them?

rpstewart · 18 Aug 2007 at 16:30

Shouldn't need to, mine's formatted with the defaults.

What's the OS, XP? Basic or Dynamic disk?

EDIT: You're not alone in having this problem, there's a customer review on Amazon where a guy describes exactly the same symptoms. He ended up returning the unit and getting something else

Berserker · 18 Aug 2007 at 17:47

Tested on two machines - one XP Pro SP2, the other MCE 2005. Also tested both USB and 1394a. Don't have 1394b. Same each time. Listed as Basic, 1397.27 GB.

I don't know enough about disk mechanics to konw if the last 2 weeks of solid formatting/verifying will/could do any harm. Assume not.

Berserker · 19 Aug 2007 at 07:01

OK - I split the disk in two (logically, not physically

) to see what would happen. Formatting two 700GB partitions shouldn't be a problem. Right?

Wrong. It gets to 300GB and hangs.

I'm thinking there's a chipset limit somewhere as both systems that have problems have old intel i865G chipsets in them. I have no idea why this should be so, but I'm running out of other options. I'm not turning up much on Google so I have little evidence to help prove this, or find a workaround.

Edit - I was able to confirm that it's a hardware problem by creating a 64MB partition at the end of the disk. Quickformatting the partition works fine, as does reading/writing data, but if I try and do a chkdsk it reports every sector in the partition as bad. I wonder if Windows has a problem accessing sectors beyond 2^31 (2,147,483,648). Wouldn't surprise me (that number pops up surprisingly often in programming).

Google doesn't turn up anything though. Anyone got any more suggestions please?