Difficulties partitioning my new HDD. Faulty HD?

NavyLCDR said:

You might want to look at that drive again in disk management. If that 4 TB drive is MBR partitioned, you are going see a large chunk of it marked as unallocated space.

As mentioned above I have a 2nd 4TB HDD formatted in GPT and windows sees the disk as a 3.68TB disk
In MBR mode it's 2048GB + 1678GB = 3726GB which equals to 3.638671875 TB
As far as I can see I'm not losing any space

Arese said:

As mentioned above I have a 2nd 4TB HDD formatted in GPT and windows sees the disk as a 3.68TB disk
In MBR mode it's 2048GB + 1678GB = 3726GB which equals to 3.638671875 TB
As far as I can see I'm not losing any space

Just curious - what drive letter is assigned to the 1678 GB space? Have you tried creating/storing a file there?

NavyLCDR said:

Just curious - what drive letter is assigned to the 1678 GB space? Have you tried creating/storing a file there?

I only created 1 partition of 500GB on my 4TB HDD at the moment to install windows (wanted to avoid running into any other issues).
The rest of the 3.1TB is unallocated at the moment.

Windows 10 has finished installing. Now I need to partition the remaining 3.1TB into 2 partitions I guess since the disk is in MBR mode.

After I partition the 2 others partitions, I will reconnect my 2nd 4TB (the GPT disk)

I'll do that tonight I have to get back to work.

I will update you tonight with how I went.

- - - Updated - - -

NavyLCDR said:

Just curious - what drive letter is assigned to the 1678 GB space? Have you tried creating/storing a file there?

Hehe you were right!
The 2TB limitation doesn't apply at the partition level but at the disk level where windows is installed on.

So I've got:
Disk 0 (4TB HDD)
- C: (windows) 500GB
- D: 1548GB
- 1678GB unallocated space (impossible to create/format a partition)

I reconnected my 2nd 4TB HDD (GPT file mode)
- E: 3725GB

So you are right I'm wasting 1,6TB due to the MBR limitation

I'm gonna buy another 1 or 2TB HDD and install windows 10 on it and done.

In any case I learned a lot of things today around MBR & GPT partitioning scheme.

Also I was thinking about why I couldn't install windows when my 2nd HDD was connected. It was because my 2nd HDD was assigned the letter C:
And I guess that windows needs to be installed on the C drive.

Maybe this will help people facing the same issue in the future.

Cheers

I may be out of line here as I am not over savvy with the previous posts. I thought I had 2 partitions and not so long ago windows 10 update wanted a protected area so another was added. I then downloaded AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard (Free), as I'm naturally lazy, to resize C&D, surprised to find their is seven partitions. Might such an app help get to the bottom of the problem?

@Arese,

Instead of getting another HDD to install Windows on, why not get a small SSD instead? Much faster performance.

Berton said:

Early on was a line of "The USB drive is brand new USB 3.1 speed.", how does that figure into the issue? I've not yet seen Windows install as a full OS on any removable drive.

That was me. I mentioned that my USB drive was in good condition after I read online that a damaged installation drive could be the reason why I was getting this error.

"Error code 0X80300024 can be caused by anything from insufficient disk space on the destination drive or damaged/corrupted installation media to a damaged, dying or otherwise corrupted hard drive."
How to Fix Error 0x80300024 When Installing Windows - Appuals.com