📎 AI Summary:
The thread discusses issues with an 8TB Seagate drive appearing as only 2TB in Windows Disk Management, after initial full recognition. The user suspects macOS interactions caused the problem, but it was actually due to using an external dock that only supports drives up to 2TB. The resolution was understanding the limitations of the docking station rather than partitioning or formatting issues.
dudah84

dudah84

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Thread Author #1
I have a brand new Seagate 8TB Barracuda drive. It show the correct model numberin the device properties window (ST8000DM 004-2CX188), but in Disk Management, it only shows size as 2048GB.

This is the second time I connect the disk, and the first time it showed all 8TB, so I'm not sure what the hell is going on. I formatted it in windows as NTFS, then connected it to my mac (moving from mac to win again) - Mac wouldn't recognize it, even though I had NTFS support installed, and asked me if I wanted to initialize it, to which I said "Ignore".
When I connected it back to the Win computer, it was down to 2TB. I'm sure it has something to do with the Mac. I know this isn't a mac forum, but maybe someone has some idea as to what may have happened. Mac shows NO partitions, neither does Windows.
 

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Solution
Neemobeer
You have the disk set up with MBR rather than GPT. The older legacy MBR only supports 2 TB partition sizes.

In Windows you can (from an elevated command prompt) type diskpart
Then
list disk
select disk # (# is the 8TB disk)
convert gpt

This will destroy any data
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Neemobeer

Neemobeer

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#2
You have the disk set up with MBR rather than GPT. The older legacy MBR only supports 2 TB partition sizes.

In Windows you can (from an elevated command prompt) type diskpart
Then
list disk
select disk # (# is the 8TB disk)
convert gpt

This will destroy any data
 

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Solution
dudah84

dudah84

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Thread Author #3
Found the problem 🤦‍♀️

I was using an external dock, and my oh-so-smart 25+ years sys admin husband failed to tell me it supports a maximum of 2TB :applaud:
 

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