Can't partition unallocated data?

sicsicsic

Member
Jul 28, 2005
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Server 2008 R2. I did a bit of research and discovered the MBR only allows four partitions, but that doesn't seem to be the issue. What am I missing? Thanks for any help!

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mv2devnull

Golden Member
Apr 13, 2010
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I did a bit of research and ...
MS-DOS partition table (the "MBR" of yours) has indeed space for four entries, of which at most one can be "extended partition" while the others are "primary".

The extended partition is a head of a chained list of logical drives, and serves as method to have more than four partitions on the module.


However, in your case we do find an another feature of the MS-DOS partition table. The partitions are described with "start" and "end" LBA indices. 32 bit indices, I guess, which means that an LBA beyond about 2TB cannot be addressed.

In short: "MBR" cannot address more than 2 TB. Use GPT partition table instead.
 

MerlinRML

Senior member
Sep 9, 2005
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In short: "MBR" cannot address more than 2 TB. Use GPT partition table instead.

This is correct. You must use a GPT partition instead to access more than 2TB. However, your issue is further complicated by the fact that this is your boot drive. Windows does not support booting from GPT partitions using the BIOS. You must switch your system to UEFI instead (if the hardware has it), which I believe will force you reinstall the OS. Since you're running Windows 2008 R2, this OS supports booting from UEFI and GPT partitions.