Windows 8.1 Home Edition nor bios sees my 4tb drive

Pwndenburg

Member
Mar 2, 2012
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I'm in over my head and could use a little help. When I first attempted to install my new HD in place of the old one under windows 8 pro it simply recognized it in bios but would not show up to make a "new simple volume". After reformating the drive in windows (probably the big mistake) and restarting as asked the comp crashed. My pro disk was a looong way away and I was essentially forced into grabbing a home edition... uggh what a waste. Now with this edition bios won't even recognize the drive. I'm assuming its not DOA b/c the bios initially recognized it. Could anyone point me to some solid guidance on making this work because everything I've read on the net through advanced google search has just confused me more. I was under the possibly false impression that the 64 bit OS could use such a large drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 

Daxwax

Member
Oct 7, 2011
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Are you booting off the drive?

If you are able to boot to windows, I would try to convert the disk to GPT.
Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc
Right click on the square disk area.
 

Silenus

Senior member
Mar 11, 2008
358
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EDIT: The notes down below were when I thought you were trying to do a clean install to a new 4TB drive and boot from it. It is still not clear though. But if you were just trying to add a 4TB storage drive to an existing install then at least make sure you are up to date with BIOS and have AHCI mode enabled for SATA ports. After that, and assuming you can boot up, get into windows. Open a command prompt and run DISKPART. Do a "list disk" command and see which disk number is your 4TB. then do "Select Disk #" where # is the disk number of your 4TB from previous step. Then just do a "clean" command (NOT clean all, that will take forever). After that exist out. This will clean the disk and put it back to a raw unallocated disk again. Now go to disk management again and if you see the disk you should be able to now initialize it as GPT. Now format as normal and you SHOULD be good.
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What motherboard do you have?
IS your BIOS up to date?
IS SATA controller in AHCI mode?
Is UEFI mode enabled?

After you check and enable all that, then you must boot the Windows disk in UEFI mode, NOT REGULAR SATA mode. With AHCI and UEFI properly enabled you should see the optical drive show as two different boot devices, one for regular SATA mode and one for UEFI mode. Make sure you boot the UEFI mode and the Windows install SHOULD then recognize and properly format the 4TB drive (you won't have to do anything manually, it will create the GPT partitions ect that it needs).
 
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Pwndenburg

Member
Mar 2, 2012
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I did all the things you all said, it turns out it was just in fact a dead drive. I was simply trying to add it to the drives not boot from it. I could not even get bios or windows to detect it after following all your instructions to the letter. I think I'm just gonna return it and get one of enterprise 2TB. More than enough really and I've never had a bad experience with those drives.
 

marshsebastian

Junior Member
Dec 14, 2013
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Then you can go with their help window. There will be an instructions manual available for you. try it, will riddle the problem surely.
 

Pwndenburg

Member
Mar 2, 2012
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You know I went to their site and couldn't even find the drive in question. Was quite odd. I'm gonna try again, surely I was just not looking in the right place.