6tb HDD only shows up as 1.99tb in disk management (Win 10 64-bit UEFI)

vihvelvin

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Dec 2, 2017
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It's a Western Digital HDD with a system reserve partition. I'm trying to change it from MBR to GPT, but I can't initialize it. Could I get away with formatting the whole drive - including the system partition - without messing it up? Note: the HDD is not my boot drive.

Here's a screencap:
Screenshot (3) by gamer Tag, on Flickr
 
Solution
1. The problem, of course, is that the System Reserved partition is located on the 6 TB secondary HDD rather than the 250 GB boot drive.

2. So as the situation now stands you need to have the 6 TB secondary HDD installed upon booting to the OS because of the location of the SR partition. As a consequence, you cannot initialize that drive to the GPT-partitioning scheme without deleting the SR partition containing data. (Disk Management will convert the disk to GPT only if NO data is contained on the drive. And the SR partition contains data, doesn't it?). But if you do that, i.e., delete the SR partition, the system won't boot as things currently stand. So you're caught in a kind of a Catch-22 situation. Capiche?

3. But there's a way...

USAFRet

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As always, a picture is worth 1,000 words.
Please show us a screencap of the Disk Management window.
 

vihvelvin

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Dec 2, 2017
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I installed Windows on a separate SSD. The 6tb drive has nothing on it - only the system reserve that it came with.
 

USAFRet

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Was the 6TB connected when you installed the OS on the SSD?
 

vihvelvin

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Dec 2, 2017
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Here you go. (Whoops it didn't show up at first)
Screenshot (3) by gamer Tag, on Flickr
 

vihvelvin

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Yep - the 6TB was connected when I installed it to the SSD. I didn't check to see if the 6TB HDD was fully operational until after I did a motherboard update, so I'm not sure if that had anything to do with it.

 


Has everything to do with it and why I asked in the 1st place.

Disconnect the 6 TB drive and reinstall Windows.

Then once that is all done reconnect the 6 TB drive, delete all the partitions and then partition it as you want.

 
1. The problem, of course, is that the System Reserved partition is located on the 6 TB secondary HDD rather than the 250 GB boot drive.

2. So as the situation now stands you need to have the 6 TB secondary HDD installed upon booting to the OS because of the location of the SR partition. As a consequence, you cannot initialize that drive to the GPT-partitioning scheme without deleting the SR partition containing data. (Disk Management will convert the disk to GPT only if NO data is contained on the drive. And the SR partition contains data, doesn't it?). But if you do that, i.e., delete the SR partition, the system won't boot as things currently stand. So you're caught in a kind of a Catch-22 situation. Capiche?

3. But there's a way to get around this. Delete the SR partition. You will need to utilize DiskPart to accomplish this; Disk Management will not carry out that deletion. The final command in DiskPart (after selecting the SR partition) is "delete partition override" (no quotes) <Enter>. You need the "override" flag (protocol) for this command.

4. At the Admin Command Prompt, type "bcdboot c:\windows /s c:" (no quotes) <Enter>
You should get a message that the boot files have been successfully transferred.

5. Using Disk Management, select the "Mark Partition as Active" option for the C: partition. (I'm assuming that drive has been MBR-partitioned.)

6. Review the commands you've invoked to ensure they're proper as per detailed above before you reboot the system.

7. You now should be able to boot directly to the Win 10 OS and if you haven't previously done so in step 2., initialize the 6 TB HDD to the GPT partitioning scheme and partition/format the drive as you wish.
 
Solution

RolandJS

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Mar 10, 2017
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"bcdboot c:\windows /s c:"
ArtPog, related to the above thread, how does one use bcdboot command-line to move the boot files from C:[root?] over into System Reserved partition which does not have a drive letter assignment?
 

vihvelvin

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Dec 2, 2017
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You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you for such a detailed solution. It took less than 3 minutes to fix with your instructions (and hours of scratching my head before your help).