3 TB HDD only shows a total available size of 1 TB

[gshelper]

My grandson has a PC running Windows 10 and was running out of hard drive space.  I purchased a 1 TB HDD  and installed it in his PC. That shows properly in both device manager and disk manager as a 1 TB NTFS Drive (left it as a single partition). However, the HDD  that was installed in the PC originally is a 3 TB HDD.  it shows up in device manager as an Intel Raid array.  Disk manager shows it has been configured with 4 partitions with all four of them being healthy: a 256 MB partition, a 447 GB partition (boot drive and OS), a 440 MB partition, and a 446 Gb partition (extra drive). It does not show any more additional usable space and will not let me expand any of the partitions. Is there any way to gain access to the other 2 TB on the HDD?

[Steve K.]

It would help if you could post a screenshot from Disk Manager to see which Drives / Partitions are installed in the machine. Could be, it wasn't a 3TB drive but something smaller. If you're not seeing it in Disk Manager... might not be there.

[gshelper]

Once I turned off the raid array and reinstalled Windows 10, all was well. Both the 3 TB and the 1 TB HDDs were there and were in disk manager. PC is now operating normally. Thanks to all for the help

 

[Steve K.]

Well there ya go! Glad you have it up and running again.

[Jimmywick]

If your 3TB HDD is only showing a total available size of 1TB, it is possible that the drive has been partitioned into two smaller partitions, one of which is not being recognized by your operating system.

To check if this is the case, you can follow these steps:

Right-click on "This PC" or "My Computer" in Windows Explorer and select "Manage."

Click on "Disk Management" in the left pane.

Look for the 3TB hard drive in the list of drives. It should be labeled as "Basic" and "Online."

If you see two smaller partitions on the drive, right-click on the unallocated space and select "New Simple Volume." Follow the prompts to create a new partition that uses the entire available space on the drive.

If the entire drive is already allocated to one partition, right-click on the partition and select "Extend Volume." Follow the prompts to extend the partition to use the entire available space on the drive.