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    HP Probook 4720s - Support for 3TB+ Drives?

    Discussion in 'HP Business Class Notebooks' started by IdontexistM8, Jun 3, 2013.

  1. IdontexistM8

    IdontexistM8 Notebook Consultant

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    Recently I started replacing some older 2TB drives with 3TB ones. As I recently switched to Win 7 64bit on my Probook I took it there would be no issues with larger capacity drives. However as I've got close to the magic 2.2TB mark I've had major problems. On two separate occasions in the last week I've had drives being shown as Raw/unformatted. The first happened when I had some data corruption and the drive then went to Raw. To my mistake I then let Chkdsk do it's worse and since then I've been picking what I can from the drive with data recovery software. Thankfully I'm reasonably well backed up, however I had let a month slip. The second occasion happened tonight when a different 3TB drive, with a similar amount of data on, would showed Raw straight from turning on, I'm currently scanning to see what's left on there.

    So I'm wondering what the deal is. Both drives were GPT formatted and as I mentioned I'm using a 64bit OS. Therefore I'm now considering the two other possibilities, 1) the enclosures I'm using aren't actually compatible with 3TB+ drives, so things go wrong at 2.2TB and/or 2) the Probook's motherboard is not compatible or at the very least the USB connections aren't. Note - I've been using USB instead esata as my main day to day external (which isn't 3TB) uses that port.

    I may have to go through a rather painful process of elimination to find out, however I thought someone here with my model (or a smaller sister one) might know.

    Can anyone help?
     
    IdontexistM8, Jun 3, 2013
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  2. DanaGoyette

    DanaGoyette Notebook Consultant

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    Is your 3TB drive a Seagate, or is the USB enclosure a Seagate one?
    With Seagate enclosures and drives, if you partition and format it with the enclosure, you can never use it without the enclosure -- and vice versa.

    Here's why: there are two overlapping layers of lies.
    The drive has 4K sectors, but lies and claims 512-byte sectors.
    The enclosure then lies again, and says it has 4K sectors.
    So, a partition table created under the 4K case will be garbage when viewed in the 512-byte case.


    It's probably a good idea to try running TestDisk against it, with both connection methods.
     
    DanaGoyette, Jun 7, 2013
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