Windows 2008R2 x64 large partition size not usable

Question

I have installed a win2k8r2 system on a large (4Tb) drive. During the setup I made my C: drive 300Gb, wanting to use the rest as a large data partition (was hoping GPT can be used), but after the installation, I found that my drive is divided into 3 parts:

As ypu can see, the system forced the division of the disks as two different parts of approx. 2Tb each, and even though I could format the D: part, the last part cannot be formatted and used at all. Ideally, I'd like to use the entire space as the D: drive, since this is going to be a staging disk for BackupExec, but any suggestion as to how I can use the available space is welcome

Thanks

Solution

The problem you have is a simple one - x86/x64 BIOS-based systems can't boot from GPT partitioned disks, EFI-based systems can. If you want full access to this larger disk you'll have to either change over to an EFI-based system or boot from a different disk, this will allow the second 4TB disk to be partitioned using GPT.

Given there are no single 4TB disks available (just yet anyway) I'm guessing this is a RAIDed bunch of 2 or more disks, either via a USB/eSATA/FC/iSCSI interface. If this is the case you may be able to present the array as more than one 'physical' disks; i.e. disk 0 = 300GB, disk 1 = the rest. This would work as you'd simply partition disk 0 as MBR and disk 1 as GPT.

Comments

[David Corsalini]

I just finished reimaging the system, and now I have the large raid array set up separately from the raid1 on which the OS is installed. I still get the same picture though

[Chopper3]

can you be clearer please, do you mean you've still presented it all as a single disk (disk 0) or have you two disks now (0 and 1)?