Need Help Installing a 4 TB HDD

[Jeff Kaos]

I have a Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2 motherboard, I'm running Windows 7 64 bit and I just bought a 4TB HDD as an upgrade. I want to clone my current 1 TB HDD to the new drive and then use it as an extra storage drive. When I installed the new drive it only shows up as a 2TB drive. I have several questions about that. First I know that in order to boot an OS from a drive bigger than 2TB you need to have a UEFI motherboard. My board has something called: "Hybrid EFI technology with DualBIOS for 3TB HDD support" and this is supposed to allow me to be able to boot from a 4TB drive. Does anyone know how this "Hybrid EFI" works? If I clone the current drive to the new drive and then boot from it will all 4TB of storage show up? There's a tool on the Gigabyte website called "GIGABYTE 3TB+ Unlock Utility" that allows 32 bit system to be able to use larger hard drives. But I'm using a 64 bit system so I don't understand why I'm only seeing 2 TB on the drive. I was also wondering if there's something I need to enable in the BIOS/setup in order to use my drive at full capacity but the BIOS on his motherboard isn't familiar to me at all and I can't find where it would be to enable the drive. If anyone can give me a basic walk through I'd really appreciate it. I have experience building systems since I did bench building for a little over a year after I graduated college but I was never really good with the BIOS stuff but I could find my way around most systems easier than I can with my personal system.

 

[Emerald]

how is the current drive, 1TB, configured? MBR or GPT?

If the drive is configured as MBR, you will only be able to use 2TB of the 4TB drive due to MBR limitation.

to be able to use the entire 4TB you would have to reinstall Windows7 in EFI/UEFI mode. You will need a Windows7 USB stick that will boot in EFI/UEFI mode.

 

[dfk]

First try installing GIGABYTE's 3TB+ Unlock Utility, it should allow you use the full capacity of the HDD as a data drive on your current OS, not sure about boot disk.

[EFI CD/DVD Boot Option] in BIOS.
Set this item to EFI if you want to install the operating system to a hard drive larger than 2.2 TB. Make sure the operating system to be installed supports booting from a GPT partition, such as Windows 7 64-bit.
Auto lets the BIOS automatically configure this setting depending
on the hard drive you install. (Default: Auto)

more info on the hybrid EFI here:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/

I would suggest sticking to your current HDD as primary boot drive (unless it's failing) and use the 4TB as a data disk to save time configuring/troubleshooting.

If you're willing to experiment, perhaps you could clone your current MBR boot disk to the 4TB (after installing the unlocker utility) and try booting from it (disconnect the original drive first), you should be still using MBR not GPT.

 

[Jeff Kaos]

First try installing GIGABYTE's 3TB+ Unlock Utility, it should allow you use the full capacity of the HDD as a data drive on your current OS, not sure about boot disk.

[EFI CD/DVD Boot Option] in BIOS.
Set this item to EFI if you want to install the operating system to a hard drive larger than 2.2 TB. Make sure the operating system to be installed supports booting from a GPT partition, such as Windows 7 64-bit.
Auto lets the BIOS automatically configure this setting depending
on the hard drive you install. (Default: Auto)

more info on the hybrid EFI here:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/

I would suggest sticking to your current HDD as primary boot drive (unless it's failing) and use the 4TB as a data disk to save time configuring/troubleshooting.

If you're willing to experiment, perhaps you could clone your current MBR boot disk to the 4TB (after installing the unlocker utility) and try booting from it (disconnect the original drive first), you should be still using MBR not GPT.

Thanks for the advice; much appreciated. I'm thinking you're right and it might be best to just keep the OS and video drivers on the current drive and migrate my software to the new drive just to save the hassle. I was able to set up a a partition with a 3rd disk on the new drive but it might be best to use the unlock tool to create a virtual HDD on the same disk. Luckily my 1TB drive is in good shape. The main reason I wanted to upgrade to a larger drive is that I'm a gamer and game collector. I have close to 300 games in my Steam library, Origins account and GOG Galaxy but only a fraction of those games are installed due to limitations and it's becoming a real pain to uninstall games to make room for new games. And most of my other media like music and photos are stored on a couple of USB drives. I also have a pretty budget PSU and was wondering if there's a significant chance that running 2 drives and the occasional CDROM drive might put a strain on it (I get paranoid about PSU's since I've had to replace a couple on my old system). My plan was to use the 4TB drive as my OS and gaming drive and the 1 TB drive as my media drive.The new 4TB drive is a Seagate SSHD gaming drive and is supposed to improve speeds but I haven't had any noticeable problem with game speeds or boot time so I guess it doesn't matter one way or the other; I just need the space. Anyway thanks for the tips.