I just bought a new Western Digital 2.5TB hard drive to replace a 300GB Seagate drive I had installed in an external enclosure connected to my iMac via USB. When I put the new drive in the enclosure, the Mac OS X Lion disk utility only sees the new drive as a 300GB capacity drive? Does my system still somehow think it's got the old hard drive? How to do get the full capacity on this drive?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.6)
Drive Preparation
1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
If you are preparing an external or a non-startup drive, then open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After ** loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in **'s status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the ** main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs,) then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the ** main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.
My problem is the drive only shows up in the ** with capacity of 300GB, not the 2.5TB that it really is. I don't know how to get ** to see it for the bigger drive it is.
Then your enclosure does not support a drive that large. You will need to use a newer enclosure that supports drives up to 3 TBs. Or find out what the enclosure does support and get a drive that size.
Here is the description of the enclosure from Amazon where I bought it:
Doesn't this look like it's supposed to support up to a 3TB drive?
I can't say. Contact Mapower and ask them to sort it out for you. Maybe there's a switch you need to set.
The controller on your external enclosure does not support drives larger than 2tb. When the firmware on the controller was written 3tb drives did not exist.
I would contact the supplier and arrange for an exchange or return of the enclosure.
Googling for "Mapower IO35QUSJ" brings up more hits for sites saying 'Up to 2TB' than for those saying 'Up to 3TB exclude Windows XP' !! 😮
So, sounds to me that 2TB is the limit not 3TB.
Stefan
I would have thought it would have let me at least partition 2TB of space rather than 300GB. I ordered a new Macally enclosure that specifically stated it supported drives up to 3TB.
New WD 2.5TB drive shows up as 300GB capacity
