2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under 50GB

[MilesAhead]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

Just accept the defaults. It looks like you are good to go.

 

[jfairman]

format progress stalled

2 hrs into the format and the progress bar seems stalled at about 10% complete. i've read that a 1tb "long" format can take over 4 hours. beginning to think that there may be a media problem, or maybe the HPA is screwed up.

 

[wither 3]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

I have my own thread on this very subject with a 2 Tb WDC drive. WDC tech support told me that I would have to format the entire drive but I didn't do that because I already had Vista and my other software on it. See my trials and tribulations here-

http://www.vistax64.com/general-discussion/301670-there-partition-size-limit-vista.html

From your screen shot, the entire drive is an extended partition. What I would do is delete the second partition and shrink the first partition to about 800 Gb. Then create a new simple volume. Vista will tell you that the rest of the drive is free but when you create the maximum partition, it will shrink it.

Here's what my drive looks like-

 

[jfairman]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

wither. glad to hear that there is a solution. while i could follow the steps you recommend, I'd like to understand what is causing the problem with two 931GB partitions. can you elaborate on the cause of the problem?

why do you recommend 800GB for the first partition? what options will i have for the second partition size .. and making the maximum amount of the disk available?

your screenshot shows 390GB unallocated. why is it unallocated? do you believe i will have to leave this much capacity unused?

is there any point in leaving the format of the "bad" partition active? seems like it's stalled. it's not clear to me why it might be stalled, or how to tell for sure if it is stalled.

 

[jfairman]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

reformat of G failed to complete. cancelled it. partition is now inaccessible via explorer.

 

[MilesAhead]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

I would try using Partition Wizard iso as Windows Disk Management is limited. There' appears to be some technical issue with WD drive. I never purchased a drive larger than 1 TB. I had seeral WD Black from 640 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB. They all initialized and formatted under Windows 7.

Partition Wizard Bootable CD allows user to manage partition directly with partition manager bootable CD.

 

[MilesAhead]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

My feeling is that there is some issue with 2 TB drive in this system. But most likely it did not block you right at the beginning because of quick format. That's why I don't believe in it. Stuff seems to work until you get aways into the drive media as it fills up. Then unpleasant surprises pop up. With slow format you get indication there's a problem from the jump.

 

[wither 3]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

jfairman- I don't understand why it's doing this stuff. My system is 6 years old and these large hard drives weren't around back then. The last BIOS update is 2009. Despite that, the BIOS correctly recognizes the size of the disc.


I recommended the 800 Gb partition because, in my experience with this, you need head room to create the second partition that overlaps into that area so that it's not an extended partition. I can create all kinds of partitions on that drive using either Partition Magic or the Windows utility and Windows always says the ones in the second Tb need to be formatted. Using Windows own format option, the formatting always goes to 100% and then says it failed. Go figure. I decided to live with it rather than trying to format the entire drive, as recommended by WDC, and having to reinstall the OS and other software. I guess I could image the C: and D: and copy them back later.

 

[jfairman]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

is the freeware home version of Partition Wizard going to be sufficient?

 

[jfairman]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

wither. can I shrink the size of the "good" partition from 931GB to 800 GB while my data remains intact inside it? data is only consuming 295GB in the "good" partition. partition magic download site does not show support for vista. maybe you have an older version? is partition wizard comparable?

 

[MilesAhead]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

is the freeware home version of Partition Wizard going to be sufficient?

The boot CD made from the ISO image you download is the full enchilada. But the other poster may have something. Partition Wizard is good to have. So even if it doesn't fix this issue due to some Sata II limitation or some such, it won't be a waste. It's worth a try.

 

[wither 3]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

Yes, you can shrink the volume without affecting your data, in this case.

As I said, I have used the free version of Partition Master (I think it was once called Partition Magic) and, although it creates partitions that span the 1 Tb and partitions within the second Tb, Windows will not recognize the partitions that are within the second TB as formatted volumes. If you tell Windows to format them, it will always fail, as I noted previously. Note that I created the partition in my screenshot that spans into the second TB with the Windows utility.

 

[MilesAhead]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

(I think it was once called Partition Magic)

Partition Magic was a commercial product that worked great up through XP. With Vista the NTFS was changed, making it incompatible with Partition Magic. Since the product is no longer developed, it will never be compatible with Vista and later.

Partition Wizard has been highly recommended on these forums. But I don't know if anyone has split a 2 TB drive with it successfully. But it sure sounds like Disk Management can't handle it.

 

[wither 3]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

There is a Partition Magic on the web which is compatible all the way up to Win 8. However, it's not the EaseUS product which I used before. I recommend the EaseUS Partition Master. It really doesn't matter because Vista will not format the partitions that either it or Partition Master creates within the second Tb of the drive.

 

[townsbg]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

I suspect a problem with the hard drive. I'm not sure that if the sectors are damaged that the space will show up as full but more than likely the space just won't show up. Still it would be worth the time to do a full scan of the hard drive with the seagate tools. Until proven otherwise I would keep the files on your good partition backed up elsewhere because if the drive is bad and it goes out then you could lose everything on both partitions even though one of them is behaving. As for formatting it will take a long time for such a large drive especially if it is a slow one however you should have made more progress than 10% after 2 hours. That could also be an indication of hard drive failure. I agree with trying partition master however backup the data on the other partition in case the format messes that up. That is unlikely but still a possibility. Also you might try turning off restore points on those partitions to free up space consumed by restore points if any.

 

[MilesAhead]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

There is a Partition Magic on the web which is compatible all the way up to Win 8. However, it's not the EaseUS product which I used before. I recommend the EaseUS Partition Master. It really doesn't matter because Vista will not format the partitions that either it or Partition Master creates within the second Tb of the drive.

Right. Seems like since it's out of production others are using the name Partition Magic. But I am surprised about the formatting issue. I just looked on MS site as to drive/partition limitations and it seemed to say 2 TB or less all is well for MBR type systems. One reason I always bought 1 TB drives, other than price, was the suspicion that 2 TB may not be totally proven/supported. Crazy business where so much seems undocumented.

 

[wither 3]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

I intended to buy a 1 Tb drive but the store was out of them. I ended up buying the 2 Tb drive. Formatting that size drive will take probably 20 hours or more. I think it took at least 10 hours to do a partial format of the drive. I didn't have any problems with partitioning my 1 Tb drive. The steps I provided will allow use of most of the 2 Tb.

The fact that this problem is happening on both a Seagate and WDC drive tends to indicate either an issue with Vista or the BIOS. Of course, one could format the entire drive as recommended by WDC and I'm not willing to do that.

 

[townsbg]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

... I just looked on MS site as to drive/partition limitations and it seemed to say 2 TB or less all is well for MBR type systems...

That's because MBR is 32-bit. It has been superseded by GPT. Master boot record - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[MilesAhead]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

That's because MBR is 32-bit. It has been superseded by GPT. Master boot record - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I understand. On the MS page it goes into that. But according to their calculations, that should be enough to support 2 TB. Something ls happening that's not fully explained or their page is in error. Also when you see docking stations with USB to Sata II they claim to support up to 2 TB drives. Some piece of information seems to be missing or maybe it's going over my head.

 

[townsbg]

Re: 2TB drive partitioned in 2 equal halves. One half shows near full but has under

I agree which is why I suggested a hard drive scan.