If your drive is over 2 TB in size it must be GPT for all of it to be recognized by Windows.
I bought an 8 TB hard drive as a second hard drive for my computer. I was able to activate it in disk management but it's only showing as a 2 TB hard drive. There is a second partition that it won't let me access. I googles how to merge the partitions but disk management won't let me do it. I even tried using a third party program called AOMEI Partition Assistant but I can't merge them with that program either. The second partition says unallocated but it won't let me create a partition on it. AOMEI says to convert the disk to GPT style but I don't know what that means.
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It sounds like your new 8 TB hard drive is not being fully recognized by your computer's operating system.
The reason for this is likely due to the partition style used on the hard drive. There are two partition styles commonly used for hard drives: MBR (Master Boot Record) and GPT (GUID Partition Table).
MBR partition style only supports up to 2 TB of storage, so any space beyond that limit will not be recognized. In order to access the full capacity of your 8 TB hard drive, you will need to convert the partition style to GPT.
To convert your hard drive to GPT partition style, you can use the AOMEI Partition Assistant tool you mentioned earlier. Here are the steps to follow:
- Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant and select your 8 TB hard drive from the list of disks.
- Right-click on the unallocated space and select "Create Partition".
- In the "Create Partition Wizard" window, select "GPT" as the partition style.
- Follow the prompts to create a new partition on the unallocated space.
- Once the new partition is created, you can then merge it with the existing 2 TB partition using AOMEI Partition Assistant or Disk Management.
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