Adding HDD to Win7 64-bit

I've finally got around to installing my two new HDDs. For my Data Drive D: a WD Black 4TB and a for my Back-Up Drive E: a WD Blue 4TB. This on my Win7 64-bit pc.

So far I am just concentrating on the WD Blue Back-Up Drive E:

Connected the HDD to a spare SATA connector on the MB and can see the HDD in Disk Management.

However I am seeing two Volumes. Both Unallocated. The first one on the left being 2048.00 GB and the other on the right being 1678.02 GB.

I understand that there is a 2 TB limit for a drive to install Win7 on, but since this is a Data drive, not a bootable drive, I am thinking that I can exceed 2TB ??

I can create a new Simple Volume of 2048 GB but cannot see how to extend to include the 1678 GB other half. I did think of creating a second Volume of 1678 GB with a separate Drive letter and using that for particular storage, perhaps photos or videos, but once the first 2TB Volume created, no option for the remainder.

So my question is, can I create a single large Volume and fully utilise my new HDD, or will I have to live with only half of the drive useable? Note that when I first created the 2 TB Volume, the Partition style was MBR. Reading on Google, it looks as if GPT would have been better, but would that be ok for a Data only drive? If so, how can I convert?

Many thanks.

Cheers!

The disk must have a GUID Partition Table (GPT) to support volumes over 2TB. You should be able to convert the disk in Disk Management by right-clicking on its label and selecting (Convert To GPT). (I think this should work even in Windows 7. If not, a Google search will turn up some tools to do this, some of which will preserve any data. The Microsoft option completely reinitialises the disk.)

Have you checked out this MS page on using disks >2TB on Win 7?

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I had come across that article earlier. My interpretation was that I would be Ok for using GPT on a data storage disk. ie not a bootable disk.

My problem being that Win7 made setting up the new HDD as MBR easy and not so easy to change one's mind and go for GPT

As I key this in I am copying the first 100 GB of data across. Will know how that goes a little later on.

Cheers!

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

The disk must have a GUID Partition Table (GPT) to support volumes over 2TB. You should be able to convert the disk in Disk Management by right-clicking on its label and selecting (Convert To GPT). (I think this should work even in Windows 7. If not, a Google search will turn up some tools to do this, some of which will preserve any data. The Microsoft option completely reinitialises the disk.)

Thanks for your reply. For some reason right clicking did not want to offer me the Convert to GPT option. Google found me quite a few tools which claimed to convert MBR to GPT but after virus checking, installing etc, those that offered the conversion wanted me to purchase a more powerful version. This despite what their website said.

Then I hit lucky and came across https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c04578208 which although aimed at converting GPT to MBR, actually gave a better description of the Microsoft Tool "diskpart" than I had read elsewhere.

My PC a Win7 64-bit is on a UEFI mother board, so looking good.

A few minutes later, one new 4 TB HDD with GPT.

Am currently copying data across and will be able to check later on whether successful.

Many thanks.

Cheers!