Seagate hard drive format capacity fix

Recently, I’ve just built a nice little media server with loads of storage. Six Seagate Barracuda (7200.11 ST31500341AS) 1.5TB hard drives and one Western Digital Green (WD15EADS) 1.5TB drive as a hot spare. I’ll divulge more information on the media server another time. Unfortunately, one of the Seagate drives was only able to format 465GB, well short of the formatted capacity of a 1.5TB drive.

A little googling around lead me to a firmware issue. Seagate makes a nice bootable utility (SeaTools) but I could not get the utility to recognize any of the hard drives attached to the motherboard. After scratching my head for twenty minutes it dawned on me to change the hard drive mode from AHCI to IDE mode within the BIOS. I made the necessary change and lo and behold, SeaTools was able to see the drives and reset the firmware to it’s native capacity. *Facepalm*