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w4ish

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 16, 2017
1
0
After dealing with this problem several years ago, I thought it had been left far behind. But I recently got a new Toshiba 3TB HD and hooked it up to my server running High Sierra (SSD, 16 GB RAM, 2012) Did not look closely at what Disk Utility was doing, but chose to initialize it in APFS as one volume. When it was finished, it was an 801 GB HD. Have tried many things to get it back, but nothing works... How do I get the missing 2+ TBs back? All the old solutions dealing with the old 2TB limit do not work today.
 
After dealing with this problem several years ago, I thought it had been left far behind. But I recently got a new Toshiba 3TB HD and hooked it up to my server running High Sierra (SSD, 16 GB RAM, 2012) Did not look closely at what Disk Utility was doing, but chose to initialize it in APFS as one volume. When it was finished, it was an 801 GB HD. Have tried many things to get it back, but nothing works... How do I get the missing 2+ TBs back? All the old solutions dealing with the old 2TB limit do not work today.
I usually format it at the drive level when this happens. Usually works. Under the view menu make sure you have it set to show all devices, and then click on the drive name (not the partition, but the drive itself. Will probably start with the Toshiba name. Erase at that level. (make sure you move all data off the drive first).
 
If you have that 3TB HD in an external USB enclosure, that's likely where the problem is.
Your external interface (the chip in the enclosure) is likely an older one that only supports a 2TB drive.
(Actually 2.2TB, which is why the 3 TB drive only shows 801GB (3 TB minus 2.2TB = ~800GB space available )
You will need to find an external USB enclosure that supports the newer, large drives.
 
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