Win 7 doesn't detect NTFS formatted 3TB drive with GPT

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buddachile

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Mar 12, 2014
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Hi all,

I bought a 3TB drive for my Win 7 (Home Edition 64 bit) Acer box for storage (not booting). First I plugged it into my USB docking station and used the Win 7 disk management tool to format it using GPT to take advantage of the whole disk as a partition. Then I transfered some data onto the drive. No problems.

Then I mounted the drive internally (SATA) but Win 7 wouldn't detect it. I could see the drive in the motherboard's BIOS settings, but not in the Win 7 disk management tool.

With the drive still connected internally I then rebooted with Ubuntu live CD and used gparted to remove the existing partition and then format an 800MB NTFS partition with the ms-dos option (not GPT). Rebooted into Win 7 and still the drive was not detected by the disk management tool.

I have since reformatted the drive with gparted using GPT and a single partition taking up the whole drive. Within Linux, on the same Acer box, I can use the drive formatted this way without issues.

Any ideas on how may be able to get this drive to show up in Win 7 when connected as internal storage?
 
Solution
Szyrs
Firstly, unless you are using a GPT partition table, you will not be able to access the full 3TB of your drive under windows. You cannot alter this without deleting all of the volumes on your drive, so don't stick with your MBR unless it is purely for testing purposes and you intend to convert the partition table to GPT once you install the drive internally.

Once you've made your mind up about that, connect via SATA and run TestDisk, you can follow the guide on the cgi security website but it is a tool that comes with windows, you should not have to download it. It is not a linux based program so you do not have to create a boot disk or anything like that. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

As stated above though, it...
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nukemaster

nukemaster

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Nov 23, 2004
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Please ensure you have the latest storage drivers installed for Windows.

For Intel you want the latest Intel Rapid Store Technology. Check the Acer site to see if they have an update, if not, Intel should have it as well.

For AMD do the same thing.

Many people ran into issues of not seeing large drives with older drivers.
 
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Szyrs

Szyrs

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Aug 28, 2013
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Firstly, unless you are using a GPT partition table, you will not be able to access the full 3TB of your drive under windows. You cannot alter this without deleting all of the volumes on your drive, so don't stick with your MBR unless it is purely for testing purposes and you intend to convert the partition table to GPT once you install the drive internally.

Once you've made your mind up about that, connect via SATA and run TestDisk, you can follow the guide on the cgi security website but it is a tool that comes with windows, you should not have to download it. It is not a linux based program so you do not have to create a boot disk or anything like that. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

As stated above though, it could be a driver issue.

In the future it is always best practive to initialise your drive in the same place that you intend to use it..



 
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