To use full 4Tb with a HP m9150f-Win7-32Bit

I had purchased a HGST 4Tb Deskstar hard drive for use on my HP m9150f-Windows 7 Ultimate-32Bit Computer.I want to use it as a Data drive,not as a system disk.Windows drive management shows this drive as only 1.6Tb available! When I ask to initialize the empty new drive,I see the GPT available button.All this is happening with the drive sitting in a USB2 enclosure.I am in need of the 4Tb space and would even settle for two 2Tb partitions if that is an option. Any and all ideas are welcome.

 

Unfortunately, 32-bit operating systems only accomodate up to 2TB drives. If you could connect the drive to a 64-bit computer with a 64-bit OS, you'd have no problem splitting the drive into 2 — 2TB partitions using Windows 7's partitioning tool.

 

Too bad the ads for these drives don't mention the 32Bit barrier! I took your advice and brought the drive in it's USB2
case to a Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit computer and got the same result of seeing only 1.6Tb available! The computer is a HP P7-1167c. Any further ideas?Anyone?

 

Along with the information plodr provided, I did state to connect the drive to a 64-bit computer with a 64-bit OS.

 

Hello mdonah.You said," a 64-bit computer with a 64-bit OS". Is the Windows Home Premium not a 64Bit OS? I know the Computer hardware was sold as 64Bit.Thank again for your attention to my post.

 

Home Premium can come in 32-bit OR 64-bit. Some DVD packages come with both DVDs in them (and I believe separate COA/Product Keys for either).

 

The OS was already installed when I unboxed the computer so i did not install from OS DVD's.What would be the best way to determine if the install is 64 or 32 Bit?

 

Right click on Computer in the Start Menu and select Properties. Under System, the System type: will tell you if you're running 32-bit or 64-bit.

 

Your simplest solution is just to download GParted, burn the ISO image to a disc & reboot & partition that 4TB into two 2TB partitions with GParted.

http://gparted.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/

If you go to the sourceforge page directly with the HP computer it should display the proper GParted download for your PC (i486, i686).

Once you burn the GParted ISO image, reboot with the 4TB drive attached & CD/DVD in the optical drive & follow the screen prompts. GParted will detect the HDs on your system & let you create/delete partition, as well as resize existing partitions.

Important: Since you will rebooting with the new 4TB drive in an external USB eclosure. Once GParted is loaded it will only display the HP hard drive. You must click on the drop down menu in the upper right corner of GParted & select /dev/sdb which will be the external 4TB HD, the size of the HD is displayed so you should make any mistakes about which HD you are working with.

You can see this in the following picture.

http://gparted.org/screens/gparted_1_big.png

Your other option if you want to make a single 4TB partition is to use the GUID partition table (GPT) partitioning scheme. You can learn how to do this from the following link.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581408

If the data you will place on the 4TB is important to you I'd suggest sticking with the GParted method. I've never used the GPT partitioning scheme & have no idea how that works using an external HD that is ejected & reconnected. If it was your OS HD & not going to be removed & wouldn't be concerned but it's an external HD.

 

The partitioning will give you a large amount of storage but, eventually, you'll get a new computer that natively supports the 4Tb capacity. Of course, then you'll need to off-load all of this drive's data, de-partition it and reformat it for the single 4Tb usage.

You may see trick software too that claims it will allow you to use the full capacity as a single partition. I strongly recommend against that. The Native OS - Windows 32-bit - is meant to handle only X capacity and 'tricks' to fool it will often result in your data-loss. You would be more wise emailing your bank-account info to Nigerian princes in Somalian exile.