The drive is installed as an internal hard drive in my system. It is not the system drive and will only hold data.
I have a 3 TB drive. Windows 7 Ultimate won't format more than 2 TB in a partition. How do I get the entire drive in a single partition?
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- A computer using Windows Vista or later (Windows XP isn't compatible with GPT formatted disks, so it can't see them)
- A sata controller that is compatible (to find out if it is compatible, find out what motherboard or add-on board SATA controller you have and google it-e.g. Intel ICH8 3TB )
- A drive that is larger than 2.19 TB
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Even if you have a supported OS (Windows Vista, Windows 7, and most flavors of Linux) that recognizes GPT, you won't be able to boot to a drive of that size unless you also have a motherboard running UEFI—something that, as of this writing in late 2010, very few do. All current Intel boards support UEFI, but almost no other major manufacturer has yet followed suit. So, under most circumstances, if you don't have a UEFI motherboard (and you probably don't), you'll have to use your extra-large hard drive for storage only. (There are worse things.)
Finally, your system's SATA controller must also be designed to recognize 4KB blocks. This isn't necessarily a big deal: As we discovered when we reviewed Western Digital's new 3TB Caviar Green hard drive, the company is including with all its above-2.19TB drives a PCI Express x1 Host Bus Adapter that lets Windows use a known driver to communicate with the drive.
Andre
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groovypost.com
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Last updated December 5, 2020 Views 250,775 Applies to: