Hard drive shown as 2 disks - how to combine?

[resucami]

I have a 3 TB hard drive connected to a Windows 7 computer. The very first time I connected this hard drive Windows "lured" me into formatting the drive and the result was that the drive showed up as a 750 GB hard drive. Whatever I tried later to get this drive back to 3 TB failed. Now this drive shows up in Disk Management as

Disk 1
Basic
2047.88 GB .......... 2047.88 GB
Online ................. Unallocated

and

Disk 2
Basic
749.39 GB ............ 746.39 GB
Online .................. Unallocated

How can I reformat this disk back to being one disk with 3 TB?

Thanks for your help.

 

[DavidE]

Post a maximized/resized screen print of Disk Management so all info is displayed using these instructions:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/274797-disk-management-post-screen-capture-image.html

MY GUESS is you will need to initialize the 3TB HD as GPT to use it as a single drive/partition.

 

[resucami]

OK, here it is:

 

[DavidE]

That doesn't show all info, you didn't follow the tutorial instructions.
The "C" drive isn't shown in the bottom pane.
I'm guessing it is Disk 0, but you didn't scroll the bottom pane to the top.

I'm guessing you have a Legacy BIOS / MBR boot disk, but i can't be sure with what you displayed.

EDIT:
I see you updated the screen print !

 

[resucami]

I updated the screen shot already and it shows now also C.

I think Disk 1 and Disk 2 (which is physically one 3 TB disk) are both GPT drives. When I right-click Disk 1 or Disk 2 I have these options:

New Spanned Volume...
New Striped Volume...
Convert to Dynamic Disk...
Convert to MBR Disk
Properties
Help

 

[DavidE]

I would get Partition Wizard (PW) and see what you can do.
I'm assuming you have nothing on the 3TB drive you need to keep (they are unallocated now).
https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

With PW you can delete your 2 partitions on the 3TB, then initialize it as GPT.
See if that makes a difference.

A 3TB drive can be initialized as GPT on a Legacy BIOS/MBR OS using full capacity for a single drive/partition.
My screen print shows i have this.
If that doesn't work, it may be an issue with the specific HD make/model you have.

I can't test the exact steps to do this in PW, i don't want to lose what i have on my 3TB HD.

 

[resucami]

Thanks. I deleted the partitions. However, I still see 2 separate GPT volumes ... and I don't know how to make them into one. To me it seems as if these two volumes are not seen as partitions but as truly two physically different disk (but I'm not sure I know at all what I'm talking about here).

The hard drive is a Seagate ST3000DM001. I'm sure it came originally formatted as one 3 TB drive. It was this darn reqeust by Windows to initialize it when it got connected the first time that screwed it up.

 

[DavidE]

You could do a diskpart clean to see if that will help fix this.
That should remove any junk that may be causing a problem.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/52129-disk-clean-clean-all-diskpart-command.html

 

[resucami]

... just found another option in PW to delete partitions. One minute ...

(Looks like it takes more than just one minute. Will report here as soon as PW is done with the job.)

 

[DavidE]

No problem, if that doesn't help did you see my post about using diskpart clean ?

 

[resucami]

Yes, I saw that. Thanks. Deleting the partitions seems to take a long time (although PW called this "quick").

 

[DavidE]

Bummer.
If you want to, cancel that, and then use the diskpart clean.
That always runs fast for me.
The clean ALL would take a long time.

 

[resucami]

I just noticed in my last screen shot that PW seems to see 2 disks with 1 partition each. Should this not be one disk with 2 partitions?

 

[DavidE]

Just guessing again, but i wonder if a PW wipe is basically doing a clean ALL.
That would write over all data on the HD with zeroes.

 

[DavidE]

I just noticed in my last screen shot that PW seems to see 2 disks with 1 partition each. Should this not be one disk with 2 partitions?

Yea, i don't know why you see 2 drives...
That's why a diskpart clean might be the better way to start.

 

[resucami]

OK. I'll do that.

 

[resucami]

diskpart is also showing 2 disks.

clean all for disk 1 is running and seems also to take quite some time.

 

[DavidE]

Clean ALL will take a long time.
That's why i suggested using the Clean option. (not Clean ALL)
Clean ALL writes over every sector with zeroes.

 

[DavidE]

Here is a quote from the tutorial i linked in post #8

9. To Use the Clean All Diskpart Command
NOTE: See the green INFO box at the top of the tutorial for more information about this command. This command will wipe the HDD, and perform a secure erase. "Clean All" takes about an hour per 320 GB to finish running. It's best to only use this command if you wanted to help make sure that the data on the HDD cannot be recovered say when giving or selling the HDD to another person.

 

[resucami]

I guess I have to wait this out now - correct?