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Merge Partitions

751 Views 6 Replies 4 Participants Last post by  bigk18
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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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If your drive is over 2 TB in size it must be GPT for all of it to be recognized by Windows.
According to your Aomei picture, the drive in Question is Initialized MBR. As stated, You must Initialize the drive GPT using Aomei Partition Assistant Convert Disk on the toolbar
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:
  1. Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant and select your 8 TB hard drive from the list of disks.
  2. Right-click on the unallocated space and select "Create Partition".
  3. In the "Create Partition Wizard" window, select "GPT" as the partition style.
  4. Follow the prompts to create a new partition on the unallocated space.
  5. 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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When I click on create partition, that's when I got the message that I have to convert it to GPT. The problem is that converting it to GPT is only available in the pro version. I don't want to pay for it, so I need a good free version to be able to do that. Disk management won't let me do anything with that unallocated space on the new drive.
In Disk Management, you can Delete the partition you created making the whole disk Unallocated Space, then right click the Disk # 1 in the lower pane and choose to Convert MBR to GPT or You can use another 3rd party app like Minitool Partition Wizard or you can start a Command Prompt as Admin and type Diskpart
I googled Diskpart and I found an article that explained what to do. I was able to convert disk 1 to GPT and then create a new volume in disk management. Now I have full access to my entire 8 TB hard drive.

3 Free MBR to GPT Converter for Windows 11/10/8/7 (No Data Loss)

2. Free change MBR disk to GPT via Diskpart (Data Loss)

Similar to Disk Management, Diskpart is also a Windows built-in tool for users to manage their disk partition. It also only supports converting an empty disk to GPT, so you need to delete all volumes on disk before using this free MBR to GPT converter.

1. Press Win+R together on your keyboard, type cmd in the Run dialogue and press Enter to open Command Prompt window.

2. In the Command Prompt windows, type diskpart and hit on Enter to launch the Diskpart tool. Then run the following commands in turn and press Enter after each one.

•list disk
•select disk #
•clean
•convert gpt


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After that, you can type "exit" and press Enter to close this window. Then you can see it is converted to be GPT style in Disk Management.
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