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How to fully use my 3Tb Hard Drive?

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Moussa93

Member
Joined
May 3, 2012
Location
Reston
Hi there,
I just build my pc and everything is working fine ;)
Everything but the hard drive...
It's working but I can only have 2Tb in Windows?
I have the other 800gb as "Unallocated"

How can I fix this?
I don't mind formating it, new build.

Thank you ;)
 
in control panel, go to admin tools, then go to computer management, then when that window pops up on the left side you should see "Disk Management"
 
is that what happens when ya right click on it? Mabye you can make partitions and do it that way.. i wish someone else would jump in and think of something im not...
 
Not really, never tried before.

But do I need to create partitions? I just want my HDD in a single 3TB partition :(
 
Your problem is that you used MBR to initialize the disk. MBR cannot reference space on a hard drive beyond 2.1TB. This is why your partition ends where it does. In order to be able to create a partition covering the entire drive you need to convert the drive to GPT. This cannot be done as long as there are partitions on the drive. This means you have to get rid of the partitions first.

Also to be able to boot from a hard drive with GPT requires UEFI (which your motherboard should have) and 64-bit Windows.
 
Your problem is that you used MBR to initialize the disk. MBR cannot reference space on a hard drive beyond 2.1TB. This is why your partition ends where it does. In order to be able to create a partition covering the entire drive you need to convert the drive to GPT. This cannot be done as long as there are partitions on the drive. This means you have to get rid of the partitions first.

Also to be able to boot from a hard drive with GPT requires UEFI (which your motherboard should have) and 64-bit Windows.

Thanks for answering. And how do I get rid of the partitions, and switch to GPT since this is my hdd and I have to do it from this computer? ( Don't have another one :/ ) ?
 
Thanks for answering. And how do I get rid of the partitions, and switch to GPT since this is my hdd and I have to do it from this computer? ( Don't have another one :/ ) ?
You can run diskpart directly from the Windows 7 installation DVD, as described here. You can then use the second part of this guide to delete the partitions and then convert the drive to GPT. This will delete all the information on the drive.
 
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