I need help to use my 3tb hard drive under windows

[sikhwarrior]

As the title says i need help to make windows to fully use my 3tb hard drive my motherboard is gigabyte GA-H67A-UD3H-B3 and my 3tb hard drive is seagate barracuda, how can i get windows to recongninse the full 3tb

[Farstrider]

The drive has to be reformatted as a GPT-formatted drive instead of an MBR-formatted drive. The old standard MBR partition tables can't describe a drive of over 2.13 TiB. Obviousely the drive has to be raw so if you have data on it, move it someplace else first!

Creating GPT Drives:

You can convert only empty, unpartitioned disks (raw drives or empty MBR drives) to the GPT format. To convert a volume that contains data, you must first manually delete the partition.

You can use the following methods to create GPT disks:

In the Disk Management console, right-click the MBR drive you want to convert to GPT and then click Convert to GPT Disk. If the drive is not empty or contains partitions, this option is unavailable.

In the DISKPART utility, select the drive you want to convert and enter the following command:CONVERT GPT

For raw disks, you can use two additional methods:

After you install a new raw disk, open the Disk Management console to start a wizard that you can use to configure the new disk. The wizard includes options to initialize the disk as MBR or GPT.

Initialize the new disk by using the Initialize Disk option in the Disk Management console.

You can also use a Live Ubuntu disk and by using "Gparted" you can convert the drive to GPT format.

[Japlabot]

Before you get that far you will also need to make sure that you have the latest drivers for your Drive Controller

For Intel based motherboard (such as yours) this is usually the onboard Intel Rapid Storage Technology.

Latest drivers for Intel RST:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=2101〈=eng&FamilyId=42

I have also read that you may also need to update your motherboard BIOS.

I just had to do this myself yesterday, I only needed to update the drivers, not the BIOS. If I used Disk Management to have it with an MBR, Disk Management would only allow me to create a 2TB partition, with GPT I could use the whole 3TB.

[sikhwarrior]

I have updated all the drivers to the latest ones , would it matter if in the bios is set to ide or achi? And converted the hard drive to the GPT but it only sees 2tb and not the full 3tb

[+Zlip792 MVC]

If you have UEFI then it can reconginze it as boot drive, I suggest updating BIOS or UEFI whatever you have.

[Japlabot]

I have updated all the drivers to the latest ones , would it matter if in the bios is set to ide or achi? And converted the hard drive to the GPT but it only sees 2tb and not the full 3tb

I would set it to AHCI anyway, report if it works. I already had it on AHCI and only needed to install Intel RST drivers for disk management to at least report the capacity as 3TB, even if the partition would only go up to 2TB before going to GPT

[sikhwarrior]

In my bios it says when it boots cds or usbs with windows 7 or above it loads UEFI and changing it to AHCI just puts it in a constant reboot

[The_Observer]

does this help?

http://www.gigabyte....te/276/3tb.html

From the sounds of it, you need to reformat the Hard drive into GPT. follow Farstrider details and you should be fine.

[jakem1]

As the title says i need help to make windows to fully use my 3tb hard drive my motherboard is gigabyte GA-H67A-UD3H-B3 and my 3tb hard drive is seagate barracuda, how can i get windows to recongninse the full 3tb

You seem to have a comic sans problem that requires immediate attention as well :p

[+devHead Subscriber²]

In my bios it says when it boots cds or usbs with windows 7 or above it loads UEFI and changing it to AHCI just puts it in a constant reboot

Without a special registry hack, you cannot switch to AHCI if Windows was installed with the setting to IDE. So, just change it back to IDE in your BIOS. Use Disk Management to set the drive to use GPT rather than MBR, and you'll have use of all 3 TB. When you've completed the tasks, let us know how it went!

[sikhwarrior]

got it working now set it to gpt and then used seagate software to set the hard drive to extended

[ToneKnee]

Without a special registry hack, you cannot switch to AHCI if Windows was installed with the setting to IDE. So, just change it back to IDE in your BIOS. Use Disk Management to set the drive to use GPT rather than MBR, and you'll have use of all 3 TB. When you've completed the tasks, let us know how it went!

IDE to AHCI works fine, it's when you go from AHCI to IDE that causes Windows to have a fit.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

You seem to have a comic sans problem that requires immediate attention as well :p

LMAO!