Seagate 6 tb drive not seen by windows

Got a 6TB hdd from tigerdirect.ca on sale, and finally put it in my new machine. Guess what? Windows didn’t want anything to do with it. It only saw the first 2TB, and wouldn’t let me address the rest of it. After hours of googling, I found the following tip.

I assume it is a new drive, and not an existing drive that has stopped working? I believe the drive needs to be initialised as GPT.

open an elevated command prompt (right click ‘Command prompt’ in start menu and select ‘Run as Administrator’, or type in CMD in search and do the same).

Type the following followed by enter:
diskpart
list disk
select disk
# (where # is the 6 TB drive)
clean
convert GPT
create partition primary
assign
format quick
exit

Do NOT get the disk wrong when you select the disk! Only do this if there is no data on the 6 TB drive.

It should now show in Windows. keep in mind that it may or may not be bootable depending on you motherboard, it should be though. However, it won’t be bootable from Windows 7. In any case, I’m guessing it is just for storage?

Now I did a few other things that didn’t help on their own but may be part of the solution.

Leave a Reply