Allocating the unallocated space (749gb) on a 3TB hard drive?

johnsmi

Hi folks,

One of the two internal drives on my desktop (with OS's on it) failed last week and so I bought a new 3TB drive. I could have done with 2TB but figured the extra space would be worthwhile.

Anyways when I partitioned it in disk management it would only allow up to 2TB of space the rest over 700GB unallocated with no option to allocate rest of space.

Seems this is normal for windows 7 maximum it can handle is 2 TB drive or otherwise convert to a GPT drive. Just found this out.

As my acronis home 2010 cant see the partitions on the GPT drive I have just let it stay as a basic MBR drive.

Does anyone know of a third party utility that would convert the unallocated space? I have tried Easeus partition manager and Mini Tool partition Wizard with no success?
Thanks
John

Exo

Whilst you can convert MBR to GPT, Windows will only boot from it if your motherboard has an enabled UEFI BIOS and Windows 7 is 64 Bit.

More information here.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26193-convert-mbr-disk-gpt-disk.html

As you have installed Windows on the recognised 2TB partition, then you may use third party software to make use of the unallocated space.
Seagate have DiscWizard for this purpose. Not sure if this will work for non Seagate drives.
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218619en?language=en_US

This will give you two partitions on the one hard drive.


I am sure other drive manufacturers provide their own software for this purpose.

enkoda

Before you go ahead doing anything with this drive, what motherboard do you have?

I bought a WD 3TB Red for my old system running off an Asus P5Q Pro motherboard (Intel P45 Socket 775). All was well for a few days until I copied over a large amount of films on to it, and the drive seemed to lose everything. No amount of formatting or partitioning would allow me to allocate the full 3TB and after a lot of googling I found that my motherboard couldn't handle drives larger than 2TB.