3TB hard drive boot issues

[cynicc]

Hi Guys,

My hardware knowledge is somewhat limited, so let me do my best to explain my situation.

I recently purchased a SeaGate 3TB internal hard drive to use as my secondary drive, just for extra storage since my 500gb main drive is almost full. I installed the drive using a second SATA cable and turned on the system. I went to disk management and formatted the drive. It was originally partitioned as 2TB and 746 gb. I chose the "New Spanned Volume" option and put the 2 partitions together to get a total of 2.72 TB. Everything was working fine until I restarted the system, now it won't load windows, I can't even get to BIOS. It just has a dash bar blinking on the top left of the screen. I tried pressing DEL or F2 to get into BIOS but it's unresponsive. Thank you

 

[inzone]

Have you tried disconnecting the 3 tb drive and then booting to see if you can boot without that drive connected ? If you can then you must have an issue with drives that are larger than 2.2 gb and you might need a bios update.

 

[cynicc]

ok I'll give that a try. Thanks

 

[ELMO_2006]

Interesting....

Once you get the system up and running you should set the 3TB drive to GPT or GUID as anything over 2.2TB will not be registered via MBR.

 

[cynicc]

yea I was looking for that option when I went to disk management but I couldn't find it. I just saw two unallocated drives. One was 2 TB and the other was 746 gb. I just right clicked on the 2 TB one and chose the new spanned volume option and added the 746 gb drive to it and now I have a F: drive with 2.72 TB. I'm using windows 7 ultimate btw

update:
I managed to boot window but I had to use the windows disc to boot it up.

 

[ELMO_2006]

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 later by using the Initialize Disk option in the Disk Management console.
Note: Starting with Windows Vista, you can install a Windows x64-based operating system on a GPT disk only if the computer has UEFI boot firmware installed. However, installing a Windows x64-based operating system on a GPT disk is not supported on Windows XP. Attempting to do so yields an error.

 

[cynicc]

ok I see what you're talking about. out of curiosity. What exactly is a spanned volume. My disk is currently MBR but for some reason the spanned volume option put the 2043GB and 746GB into one 2.72TB disk. When I check windows explorer, the drive says 2.72 TB?

 

[ELMO_2006]

A spanned volume is a dynamic volume consisting of disk space on more than one physical disk.
If a simple volume is not a system volume or boot volume, you can extend it across additional disks to create a spanned volume, or you can create a spanned volume in unallocated space on a dynamic disk.

Thus 2043 + 746 = 2.72GB

 

[cynicc]

hmm so basically, disk management is seeing my hard drive as two separate hard drives. Now is there a disadvantage to using the spanned method or do I really need to switch from MBR to GPT? and if I switch to GPT, will I still be able to use the spanned option? Thanks

 

[ELMO_2006]

The advantage of a spanned volume is that it allows you to create a large volume consisting of smaller pieces of disk space from several disks, thereby making more efficient use of the disk space than would be possible if you had to limit the volume to a single disk. The disadvantage of a spanned volume is that it is not fault tolerant. If one of the disks containing a spanned volume fails, the entire volume fails. However, a spanned volume can be mirrored.

 

[cynicc]

Best answer selected by cynicc.

 

[cynicc]

I see, thanks so much for the replies ELMO..