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Our surveillance server running Windows2008r2 (standard), had a software RAID5 of five 1TB HDs. Ran well for 2 years, till one drive died last week. Decided to "upgrade" and increase room to five newer, larger drives, 3TB each. Each drive is initialized as GPT, formats, is viewed and usable just fine. But when converting to dynamic from basic each drive suddenly showed a size of only 752GB!

This happens individually, as well as if I create an array, convert and format all 5 at the same time.

CPU is a Core2 Duo, older mobo (XFX Nforce 780i) does not have UEFI. Old HDs are 1TB each, 7200 RPM desktop drives. New drives are WD RED (NAS) drives.

This was the same result running the initial OS, and when I installed as a clean version. *Note: Although the mobo will support, and does create a hardware level RAID5, the OS doesn't see it which is why the 'software' array.

This one really has me scratching my head.

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  • Looks like one of those situations where the BIOS can't properly handle large disks... but then this would happen regardless of the partitioning scheme in use. Converting from basic to dynamic really shouldn't cause this.
    – Massimo
    Dec 25, 2015 at 0:26
  • Are you sure the disks are not being converted to MBR by mistake (or bug)? Have you tried re-initializing them, using the dynamic format fron the start instead of converting them later? (The clean command from diskpart is useful here to wipe all configuration and partitioning info and start fresh.)
    – Massimo
    Dec 25, 2015 at 0:29

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