I recently purchased a Seagate Barracuda 3TB drive (ST3000DM001). After installing it, my BIOS recognized it but reported the size as 801.6gb. I went ahead and booted into Linux anyway (Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit).
Linux saw it as a 2.7TB. Following some online instructions (don't have the link handy, unfortunately), it looks liked converting this drive to GPT was recommended. So I used gparted to do that, then formatted it to NTFS also using gparted. (I'm using NTFS because my machine is daul-boot and I want to have access to the drive in Windows too).
I rebooted to Windows (Windows 7 64-bit), and Windows also sees the drive with 2.7TB free. Everything seems to be working fine.
The only issue is that my BIOS is still reporting the drive as 801.6GB. My motherboard is an ASRock 770 Extreme3 and BIOS is the latest version.
Since everything seems to be working with the new drive anyway, I'm hoping that the fact that the BIOS is reporting the wrong size is not an actual problem. But honestly, I don't really know. Anyone out there more familiar with this know if this could potentially cause any problems in the future? Any way to get the BIOS to report the correct size?
Best Answer
It's not a problem. BIOS needs to be able to see enough of the beginning of the drive to bootstrap the system into whatever operating system you're running. After that, BIOS doesn't matter for disk access.