Why is the capacity of the drive only showing 8.4 GB, 32 GB, or 137 GB when the capacity is significantly larger?

If the BIOS only recognizes 8.4 GB, 32 GB, or 137 GB of the hard drive, your system BIOS may not support the full capacity of the drive. This article explains.

If the BIOS only recognizes 8.4 GB, 32 GB, or 137 GB of the hard drive, your system BIOS may not support the full capacity of the drive.

Most often, there are two possible solutions to this problem:

  1. Check with the system or motherboard manufacturer for any BIOS upgrades for the system. If there are no BIOS updates from the manufacturer, you can visit www.esupport.com for a BIOS update. Seagate has no affiliation with esupport.com and offers this information as a courtesy to our customers.
  2. (Recommended) Purchase a PCI ATA controller card that will support the capacity of the drive. The two benefits of ATA controller cards are:
    1. the ability to support large capacity drives
    2. the ability to support the faster transfer rates of the drive.


For further troubleshooting solutions for drives appearing as 32GB, please refer to Document ID: 182079.

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