Windows 8 Why is my new 3 TB drive only showing 2 TB?

[James Anning]

I bought a 3 TB drive today, to replace my, existing 1 TB drive which was 95% full. This is my "D" drive and is
data only, no OS on it. Its actually all my WEB server data, for IIS. (I'm on Windows 8.1 Enterprise 64 bit).
My plan was to use Paragon Hard Disk manager and clone my existing 1 TB, D drive to the new 3 TB drive which was
on an external ESATA. In the past I've successfully used Paragon to clone my OS drives from spinning to SSD.
Sometimes the Source drive has been bigger than Target, other times vice-versa...have never had an issue.
Being this is data only, my main reason for using a clone instead of copy is to capture all the security, network
and other drive specific windows settings...not having to go in and redo all that. I'm figuring if Paragon has
successfully cloned an OS, this should be a breeze...and it was ...cloned and swapped.

My issue, I notice my 3 TB drive, windows is only "seeing" 2TB. (2048 GB) and leaving 746.52 GB as unallocated.
Windows disk manager screen shot below:

http://www.aanning.com/ajissues/Windows_errors/Three_only_two/ss1.jpg

I'm guessing I could make an "E" drive of 746 GB...but, I'd rather have all 3TB on the "D" drive.
Using Minitool partition wizard I try to extend...and get "not enough free space" (I'm using 779 GB of the 2048 GB)

http://www.aanning.com/ajissues/Windows_errors/Three_only_two/ss2.jpg

Going back to Paragon...and trying to resize the partition...it shows the max as 2,097,151MB

http://www.aanning.com/ajissues/Windows_errors/Three_only_two/ss3.jpg

I'm sure...or am hoping this is an easy solution, but don't want to "just try something" and loose a lot of data.

Please advise.

 

[Neemobeer]

Because you probably have it set as MBR. MBR partitions have a limit of 2TBs. You'll need to change the disk to GPT.

 

[James Anning]

Yes, it was MBR. I used Windows disk manager, and converted it to GPT...loosing my just under 1 TB of data....no big deal, I can used paragon to put it back on from the original drive. Paragon saw this now as a 3TB drive, however, it looks like the clone max is 2 TB...again, no issue, my data is less than half of this. I assume once done, I will have my 900 mb of data, again on a 2 TB drive with 1 TB unallocated. However, this time, I should be able to use Minitool partition wizard and extend this now GPU drive to 3 TB...I'm hoping.

 

[Neemobeer]

Paragon probably clones the entire disk, including the partition table, so you'd want to backup the data to some other media, then format the disk as GPT and move the data back.

 

[James Anning]

absolutely, paragon "clones" drives a true clone, it's about as a perfect replication as I've seen. it clones so well, the 3tb drive was GPT, after cloning it was MBR. I tried the built in windows convert from mbr to gpt...oddly it errors out saying it was a DVD DRIVE.
I used paragons concert, it had to reboot to run during start up, works like a champ.
no data loss. I used windows drive manager to extend to 3tb.... all is good now.
I've heard robo copy will do what I needed.... which was to copy all security settings, permissions and a massive windows indexing files and settings. I really did not want to redo all that. I've been told a setting in robo form will also do this, but I've always had excellent success with paragon and once again it has come through for me

 

[Jamie Kaler]

I was facing the similar issue but now with the help of this post i understand the reason. Thanks for sharing!