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Problem formatting external disk

Billzz

Billzz

Billzz

Associate
Joined
11 Dec 2003
Posts
297
Hi all,

I’m having some trouble with formatting an external disk. The disk is a WD Red 4TB which I currently have housed in a Akasa Black S USB 3.0 box.

The problem is when going to format the disk, it is showing as two *physical* disks - (this is in both OS X and Windows). The disk sizes are 2048 for disk 1 and 1678 for disk 2.

The disk itself was from a WD iCloud unit which I took apart because the iCloud unit was so bad - (avoid if you get the chance).

I cannot get this drive to partition as one drive - could there be 'special' firmware on the disk that makes it work as 2 separate disks? Anybody any ideas?

Thanks for any replies.
 
Odd - I can't see how/why the disk would do this. Can you easily connect it directly to a motherboard sata port to take the Akasa USB enclosure out of the equation?
 
If it's been initialised with a Master Boot Record (MBR), then there's a 2TB limit. If it's initialised with a GUID Partition Table (GPT) then there is no limit.

Sounds like you need to re-initialise it with a GPT.
 
Good thought about the 2TB MBR limit, but does this cause the remainder to show up as a separate 'physical' disk?
 
Hi Borealis,

Thanks for the reply. I have tried reinitialising both 'drives' in OS X using GUID but it didn't make any difference - I still cannot partition as one drive afterwards.
 
both partitions need to be wiped
just had a play with my new 4tb drive, deleting both the partitions still may not let reintialise as a gpt drive.
pop it back into windows pc, run diskpart
select the disk, then clean, exit diskpart reinitialize in disk manager as a gpt drive
 
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