Cant format part of hdd

Forum Storage : Hard Drives Cant format part of hdd

Hello,
Yesterday I got a new 3tb external hdd that i planned on using as an internal.

I unboxed it and plug it in still enclosed to just check it out, came up as 2.7 tb, which is what i was expecting.

I removed it from the enclosure, plug it via sata to my mobo, turned the pc back on. It said the new drive had to be formatted, kinda odd, but i did it anyway

It then was only showing 349 GBs, went into disk management to check it out. It had for some reason split it into 3 different partitions i guess. One 349, one 1700ish, one 700ish.

I undid the partitions and reformated again, only this time i could only make one 2tb partition, theres still 700 gigs it wont let me do anything with. i can right click it but i cant select anything.

What did I do, and how can i fix it? running windows 7 64bt

Thanks for any help

Reply to scintron529

If you're using an older board the bios might need to be updated to support the 3TB drive as older Bios' will only see up to 2TB. Also, the drive needs to be formatted using GPT format option in Disk Management.

Message edited by dominionz on 07-01-2011 at 10:53:17 PM

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Reply to dominionz

I've had other 3tb drives connected before and when i first plugged this drive in it showed up as 3tbs.

It wasn't until it got formatted again that it started doing this.

In disk management, it is showing up as 2794.52 gbs, but it is only letting me format 2048 gigs leaving 746.52 gigs unallocated and unclickable.

Also, I dont see GPT format anywhere, just NTFS, which i want, and exFat.

http://i1108.photobucket.com/album [...] pImage.jpg

Reply to scintron529

Go to disk management , delete all partitions on the disk , right click on the gray part of the disk in disk management convert to GPT, once that is done you should be able to use all of the disk space. GPT is the replacement of the old MBR. I have a 4TB raid that i had to convert to GPT to use the entire raid in one partition and it's still NTFS.

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by dominionz on 07-02-2011 at 12:44:35 AM

dominionz wrote :

thank you so much, i never thought to click there, i just kept clicking on the middle parts over and over again like an idiot.

everything is working fine now although i do have one more question

The new drive is a 7200rpm, 32mb cache and my main drive is a 5400rpm, 32mb cache, my mobo only has 3GB/s sata ports.

What kind of transfer speeds should i roughly be getting? right now its only around 80 Mb/s

Reply to scintron529

Hard to say since there are a lot of factors that determine that. My WD Green 2TB drive averages 90-96 on ATTO benchmark and that's a 5200 drive but i'm using a Sandy Bridge board/cpu so all my stuff is new. My 3 1.5TB Seagate's in raid 0 is about as fast as my Vertex 2 SSD at around 250+. I would bench the main drive and compare. If you think it's too slow try updating chipset drivers. Could also be that particular HD is just that fast. When all else fails do a google search. "name of HD" benchmark. :sol:

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