2TB drive showing as 99.9MB help needed

overclick · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:08

Sorry to be a pain,

I have just upgraded adding an SSD, installed win7 in ACHI with SSD only, think that went fine. Have just added the 2TB in sata3 (E) and my old 500g in sata 4 (F).

Everything looks fine except the 2TB is showing as reserved 61.8MB free of 99.9 MB.

Note the 2 TB had never been formated.

Any ideas? probably some window setting thing

VaderDSL · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:10

Have you had a look at the drive in disk management?

overclick · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:27

God I still can't work out windows 7, where is disk management?

Hyburnate · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:29

Computer then right click the drive (I think)

overclick · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:33

had to run a command line prompt to open it ok my computer sees it but i'm not sure what it is upto.

Disk 0 1863.02GB unallocated
Disk 1 System Reserved (E) 100MB and (F) 465.66GB primary partition
Disk 2 Wystem Reseverd 100MB (no drive lettrer) and (C) 60Gb Boot

overclick · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:39

okay i can see how to set up the 2tb disk.

But are the system reserved bits important? Why would one have been assigned a drive letter and the other not?

-fedexer- · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:43

The OS needs the reserved space probably for your page file i'll assume, you can set this up manually to be on a specific drive, but yeah it's useful to have hey?

overclick · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:45

Sounds important then

Just started a slow format on 2TB drive... yawn.

-fedexer- · 17 Sep 2011 at 20:55

Hmmm don't get me wrong, but shouldn't the first format of the drive only need to be a quick format? or have I got this wrong, I'm sure all I had to do was quick formats.

overclick · 17 Sep 2011 at 21:02

You are more likely to be right than me, nevermind guess as I have started I better finish!

-fedexer- · 17 Sep 2011 at 22:16

Ahk well, food for thought for next time hey

Goodluck from here on out.

ChrisD. · 18 Sep 2011 at 00:36

overclick said:
had to run a command line prompt to open it ok my computer sees it but i'm not sure what it is upto.

Disk 0 1863.02GB unallocated
Disk 1 System Reserved (E) 100MB and (F) 465.66GB primary partition
Disk 2 Wystem Reseverd 100MB (no drive lettrer) and (C) 60Gb Boot

Disk 0 is your new 2TB drive. Right click on the unallocated space and you can create a new simple volume.

Disk 1 is your old OS drive. Win 7 puts the bootloader and other install files onto a 100MB partition, and the rest is used as normal. You can safely delete the 100MB and extend the disk using diskpart as long as you don't need to boot from this drive again.

Disk 2 is your new SSD, as above, 100MB is system stuff and the rest is your OS. If you really want, there is a slightly long winded way of removing this 100MB, but it's not really worth it.

Personally, I'd swap the SATA cables round so your SSD is on SATA port 0, 500GB on port 1 and the 2TB drive on port 2 (or the other way round, but system disk should be 0). In my opinion of course.

Just a personal thing.

overclick · 18 Sep 2011 at 02:50

Ah cool so I only need to keep the reserved on the new SSD boot, think i will remove the other one.

I had a scare when installing the 2 new disks. after I had plugged everything in and wired it back up I clicked the power button and NOTHING! Thought I'd managed to blow the mobo or something. Thankfully I had just knocked the front power switch connector off from the mobo phew.

overclick · 18 Sep 2011 at 03:04

Now I just have to spend hours working out how to get everything on the right drive i.e. os and 2/3 main games + steam on SSD, all other programs (office e.t.c.) and the rest of steam on the 500GB then all media, downloads, docs etc to go to the 2 TB. Going to be a head ache at 1st i bet.

weird_dave · 18 Sep 2011 at 13:37

Most other programs are quite small (apart from office), so I just install them on the SSD.

I have a similar 3 drive setup, I use the small HD as a scratchpad where all my downloads go.
2TB for media and other stuff that isn't changing too much. I've got my games on here too.
This setup keeps the large drive from getting fragged too quickly which can happen after lots of downloads. Obviously my small (320GB) drive takes a beating, but it's not being used for anything I'm impatient with

Antar Bolaeisk · 18 Sep 2011 at 13:59

overclick said:
okay i can see how to set up the 2tb disk.

But are the system reserved bits important? Why would one have been assigned a drive letter and the other not?

You shouldn't generally see the system reserved bit in the main OS (unless you manually assign it a drive letter) and, depending on how your setup has changed since you moved over to the SSD, it may not be important any more. The boot files are stored there as well as the bit locker security if you're running enterprise or ultimate Vista or 7.

Was the 2TB in the system when you installed windows?

overclick · 18 Sep 2011 at 19:05

Nah, I installed with just the SSD in then put in the new 2TB disk and the old 500gb.

I can see what the system has done, new ssd installed windows and it set aside a 100MB reserved partition with no drive letter. Then i added back in the brand new 2TB and the used 500gb. The 2tb was uninitialised which I have now done through diskmanager so have one nice big space but the OS saw the old 500gb was split (previous os disk so had another 100MB partition). I am now moving the important stuff from the 500 GB to the 2TB. I will then format and remove the partition on the 500gb.

My 2TB is a WD green which has slower spindle RPM so i guess it will be a bit slower than the 500GB. So i intend to use the 2TB for media and backups and the 500GB for steam and office applications for a slight (probably not noticeable) performance boost.

ChrisD. · 18 Sep 2011 at 20:44

Sounds like a plan, but you will be surprised at the speed of the WD Green.