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I have Windows 7 and Windows Vista ultimate both 64 bit. Tried both. So my hard drive went out and I picked up a Hitachi 2 TB drive. I have an old small drive from my laptop with Windows 7 on it which I am working from now. I put this drive in and the 2 TB drive so to work with disk management. I booted up to check the BIOS and both drives are seen in BIOS. I load up Windows 7 and in my C drive I do not see the 2 TB drive.

I have right clicked on My Computer also it won't let me change letters on the Hitachi. So on to Disk Management and loaded it up and it sees all drives my small drive that is working c: the Hitachi drive reads like 2048 GB with no drive letter tells me it is healthy and online and it will not let me assign any drive letter it will not let me format, which I think this is what has to be done before it will let load Windows from a disk.

I have also loaded with the Windows disk. I get to the part where you can format, load drivers and so on but the Hitachi drive is not there?

My machine:

  • SATA drives
  • 16 gig memory
  • AMD Radeon HD770
  • Ga-9701-ud3 board
  • AMD Phenom 2x4 955 processor @ 3200mhz

There was no setup disk with the Hitachi drive and I did pick it up new.

Mokubai
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user368321
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  • possible duplicate of [Clean install of Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on a UEFI with GPT laptop?](http://superuser.com/questions/676249/clean-install-of-windows-7-pro-64-bit-on-a-uefi-with-gpt-laptop) – Sun Sep 14 '14 at 16:43
  • Did you initialize the hitachi 2tb? That is required before you can partition then format it. – Sun Sep 15 '14 at 00:01

1 Answers1

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Please take a look at this Microsoft kb article to see what is required to have a bootable system with a 2 terabyte hard drive.

Overall requirements for a bootable system volume

  • The disk must be initialized by using GPT.
  • The system firmware must use UEFI.

You are using Windows 7 64-bit, so you are on the right track. Your motherboard needs to support UEFI. You need to initialize the new hard drive in GPT format.

Sun
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  • Sorry, but you misread the MSKB article. It says you need GPT and UEFI to boot from a hard drive that is *larger* than 2 TiB. A "2 TB" hard drive is smaller than that. – Jamie Hanrahan Sep 14 '14 at 17:20
  • My 2 TB drive certainly is bootable, without UEFI or GPT. Since the HD industry uses decimal prefixes, a drive marked as "2 TB" is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, plus a bit more. The "2 TB" that article is talking about is 2 TiB, i.e. 2,199,023,255,552 bytes. (From the article: _"references to '2 TB' actually refer to a product that is labeled as having '2.2 TB' of capacity."_) And even if a drive is larger than the "2 TiB" limit, it will still show up in Disk Manager if connected as a data drive and diskmgmt will still let you create partitions in the first 2 TiB. Something else is wrong. – Jamie Hanrahan Sep 14 '14 at 21:15
  • Am I overthinking this then? Maybe op just need to [initialize, partition, then format the hard drive](https://www.winhelp.us/disk-management-in-windows.html). Maybe he didn't initialize the hard drive yet since it is brand new. – Sun Sep 14 '14 at 21:54
  • He said it's a "Hitachi 2 TB" drive. If you'll check the specs on Hitachi drives you'll see that Hitachi (like all other drive makers) notes that they are using decimal prefixes. That means the drive is 2,000,000,000,000 bytes - and a little more, but nowhere near enough to be at the 2 TiB limit for MBR partitioning. There really isn't any doubt or ambiguity about this. – Jamie Hanrahan Sep 14 '14 at 22:00