Question: I recently purchased a 4TB hard drive. This is my first time working with disks larger than 1TB.
From what I discovered through googling, I found that I have to initialize the disc using GUID Partition Table (GPT), instead of MBR. I did that when I first plugging the drive in.
The problem is that Windows 7 only sees about 1.5TB on it. I thought it might show me more once formatted, but it did not. So I deleted the volume hoping that would reveal more options in the disk management tool, but it did not. Here’s what I’m left with:
How can I get Windows 7 to recognize all 4TB of the drive?
I can’t seem to find a definitive answer on whether it could be my motherboard that is having trouble with this. Also, I’m actually using a board I took from an old external usb drive to connect the drive to the computer. So if these boards can be limited, I suppose it could possibly be the reason. How would I be able to tell?
Answer: I was able to fix the problem myself.
Recall from my question that I had the new hard drive connected to the computer via an usb board from an old external hard drive. I circumvented using that and plugged the new drive directly into my mother board. I was able to format the entire 4TB of the drive as expected. Oddly, I took the new drive out and put it back in the old usb board and windows has no problem seeing all 4TB. The board must have just had a problem reporting the unallocated space to Windows. Thanks to the others who answered or commented.
Since July 2015 to March 2020 I’ve been using a USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Duplicator/Clone Docking Station for 2.5″ & 3.5″ HDDs. I’ve yet to use the cloning feature, but I accessing the HDDs is simple. I just slip them in the top slots and connect via USB to the computer. The one I have has an explicit 12TB limit. I’ve successfully used and allocated fresh 8TB drives many times. One concern I’ve had is over heating when copying a lot of data that will take many hours. In those instances, I set up an external USB fan to blow on the drives.
The one I have doesn’t seem to be available anymore, but there’s a lot of options now. This is mine:
