Windows detects my hard drive but only half of the capacity?

[Otto Rasmusson]

I have a seagate barracuda 4TB hard drive and widows detects it and I have added and allocated it in disk management but I can only use half of the capacity (2TB) and the other part isnt allocated (1678 gb to be precise and 500 gb is reserved by widows) when i try to allocate the unallocated (1678gb) storage I need to delete (format) the storage that's allocated too be able to allocate the 1678gb and vice versa. 

I apologise if there were bad English or grammar mistakes, English isnt my native language

[Windows7ge]

Older versions of windows will by default partition the drive using MBR (Master Boot Record) this partitioning scheme will only allow the creation of partitions up to 2TB and will only allow up to 4 partitions on a single drive. You have to format the drive using the GPT partition scheme to allow the creation of a larger than 2TB partition.

[jools]

yep gpt or 2 partitions 0f 2tb

[Otto Rasmusson]

34 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Older versions of windows will by default partition the drive using MBR (Master Boot Record) this partitioning scheme will only allow the creation of partitions up to 2TB and will only allow up to 4 partitions on a single drive. You have to format the drive using the GPT partition scheme to allow the creation of a larger than 2TB partition.

But i have the latest version of windows 10?

[Windows7ge]

7 hours ago, Otto Rasmusson said:

But i have the latest version of windows 10?

The OS installation media can affect which partitioning scheme is used. For older BIOS based motherboards you can only boot to a 2TB sized partition using MBR. GPT may not work on older motherboards for the boot partition.

 

From my experience you can use CMD to partition a secondary drive in GPT. If you want one 4TB partition you'll have to reinstall windows and attempt to use GPT. If you don't care you can assign the unlocated drive space a drive letter using either CMD or Disk Management so long as 4 partitions don't already exist on the drive.

[Otto Rasmusson]

5 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

The OS installation media can affect which partitioning scheme is used. For older BIOS based motherboards you can only boot to a 2TB sized partition using MBR. GPT may not work on older motherboards for the boot partition.

 

From my experience you can use CMD to partition a secondary drive in GPT. If you want one 4TB partition you'll have to reinstall windows and attempt to use GPT. If you don't care you can assign the unlocated drive space a drive letter using either CMD or Disk Management so long as 4 partitions don't already exist on the drive.

Ok thanks for the help! I will see what i can do!