Windows 10: How can I partition a 6TB HDD in Win 10?

I have a new system running under Win 10 on which I want to use an SSD as the boot drive with all my s/w and a WD 6TB Black HDD for my data. However, when I format the 6TB drive it shows up as two unallocated segments, one of 2048.00 GB and the other with 3541.03 GB. The smaller one is available for a simple partition under Win 10 Disk Management, but actions for the larger one are all greyed out. When I make a simple partition in the smaller one the option to extend the partition is greyed out. Does anyone know the secret to using the full 6TB under Windows 10?

:)

 

How can I partition a 6TB HDD under Win 10?

For other users reading this...

Here's the link to your thread in tenforums.com:
http://www.tenforums.com/installation-setup/31237-how-can-i-partition-6tb-hdd-win-10-a.html

 

How can I partition a 6TB HDD under Win 10?

Hey there woneil,

Good work on fixing this. MBR partitions support volumes of up to 2.2TB and you can't really use larger drives with the MBR system. GPT is what you'd need and it's usually quite easy to reformat the drive from the Disk Management from MBR to GPT (the drive
does get formatted and you won't be able to read any data from it after that so a backup is recommended if you have anything on the drive). Windows 10 requires you to have one single volume in order to convert the drive from MBR to GPT so if you have had two
separate partitions you were most probably limited by this.

Feel free to ask if you happen to have further questions.

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You need to initialize the disk as GPT disk type. MBR disk type only allows to create partition of 2TB max.

 

It needs to be a GTP disk. You can rt click on the disk in disk management and convert to GTP.

 

Thanks to you and JohnC. I should have thought of that myself. One reason I didn't may be because Disk Management shows no option to convert to GPT. I wonder whether this could be because I have the "home" Win 10 rather than the "pro". Any further suggestions?

 

MiniTool Partition Wizard Free:
Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free

You can also do it via diskpart commands, but I would have to look that up. MiniTool partition wizard won't destroy any data already on the drive, if you have data on it.

 

No need to use third party partition. Open Admin command prompt:

• Diskpart
• list disk
• ========>Take a note of disk numder for the 6TB drive
• select disk # ====> # from step 3
• Clean
• Exit
• Open disk management. A windows popup. Select GPT to initialize.

 

Yes thanks, I'd already remembered about Diskpart and used it successfully to convert to GPT, after which Disk Management made me a 5.6TB primary partition without any problem. Diskpart is worth knowing about, see DiskPart Command-Line Options for its commands. You can do most of this via Disk Management, but not all.