Using unallocated space on the same physical drive as the system partition

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Brian
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Going back about a year ago I cloned my Windows 7 OS onto a larger 3TB drive. It worked fine and I used 2 of the 3TB for this partition. I've got just under 1TB which is unallocated space.

I've tried various partitioning tools to try and create a partition and therefore usable space for this 1TB or even extend the C partition to use the whole drive but nothing seems to give me the option.

I've done some googling and it would appear that creating a partition on a system drive from unallocated space doesn't seem as easy as normal partitioning.

Could someone please point me in the right direction on how to free up this additional 1TB?

Thanks,

Brian
 
more info please. what os and bit are you running? if its 32 bit then MBR wont support more than 2TB.

could also be a hardware limitation, whats your motherboard? essentially you will need to find out if your motherboard supports booting to GPT via EFI.

personally i would have left the smaller drive as the OS and used the 3TB as data.
 
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Sorry Neil, I should have said it's Windows 7 64 bit and the motherboard is a Asus P8Z68-V LE which I believe does support booting to GPT via EFI.

The reason for the cloning to a 3TB drive was the original drive was playing up so cloned it before it went bang. Most of my data sit's on other drives in the PC and the C drive is only 280Gb used but just want to be able to use the spare 1TB for possible back up of some of my data drives.
 
i dont think you can convert a boot disk from MBR to GPT. you may have to format during a reinstall in that case?

(you could always just try it.. in disk management right click, is "convert to GPT" available? BACK UP YOUR DATA FIRST)
 
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Well that's a bugger. I don't want to format it and re-install the stuff I do have on it unless I have to. I'll just have to accept that I've lost 1TB.

Thanks as always Neil. Cheers.
 
Well, you don't have to loose it, you might still be able to create a new partition and format it as d:, some motherboards/boss did use to have a fake disk driver to allow them to use >2TB disks even when them shouldn't have. Think it might have been slow though.

You could download a liveCD and attempt the following: http://askubuntu.com/questions/8450...-mbr-drive-to-a-gpt-and-make-ubuntu-boot-from

BUT, there is a chance that the GPT partition might end up ordering the disk ID differently enough that you would need to edit Windows' boot menu manually afterwards.
 
Shadow said:
Going back about a year ago I cloned my Windows 7 OS onto a larger 3TB drive. It worked fine and I used 2 of the 3TB for this partition. I've got just under 1TB which is unallocated space.

I've tried various partitioning tools to try and create a partition and therefore usable space for this 1TB or even extend the C partition to use the whole drive but nothing seems to give me the option.

I've done some googling and it would appear that creating a partition on a system drive from unallocated space doesn't seem as easy as normal partitioning.
Click to expand...

Surely if it's unallocated space then that already is a partition?

If it wasn't then wouldn't it be part of drive C?
.
 
petersmart said:
Surely if it's unallocated space then that already is a partition?

If it wasn't then wouldn't it be part of drive C?
.
Click to expand...
I suppose you could call it a partition but you can't allocate it a drive letter or do anything with it...It just sit's there.
 
coldpenguin said:
Well, you don't have to loose it, you might still be able to create a new partition and format it as d:, some motherboards/boss did use to have a fake disk driver to allow them to use >2TB disks even when them shouldn't have. Think it might have been slow though.

You could download a liveCD and attempt the following: http://askubuntu.com/questions/8450...-mbr-drive-to-a-gpt-and-make-ubuntu-boot-from

BUT, there is a chance that the GPT partition might end up ordering the disk ID differently enough that you would need to edit Windows' boot menu manually afterwards.
Click to expand...

Thanks. That's starting to sound beyond my capability and where blind panic is likely to set in. ;)
 
If you can boot from a USB stick. Then you can download say Ubuntu and use a Windows utility to create a bootable stick. Instructions are on the Ubuntu site. Boot into Ubuntu. It doesn't affect you windows installation. Install gparted to stick and run it. It's all easy to do if you follow online instructions. But as coldpenguin points out, you might need to sort out the drive letters afterwards. But don't bother backing anything up. Cos, what could go wrong? ☺. The only danger is you might end up liking Ubuntu. Especially when you realise you can reinstall all your Ubuntu apps with just a mouse click.
 
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