I recently purchase a Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H motherboard that uses Intel chip sets including the ability to create different levels of RAID drives. In setting up my system I created a RAID 5 disk array using 4 Western Digital 2TB drives. Then I installed Windows 7 Professional as the OS. My problem is that it turns out that Windows does not seem to be able to address disks with sizes greater than 2 TB.
I need to figure out how, or if I can use unallocated space on a RAID5 drive created with your Intel Chipset. The Disk I created uses (4) 2TB drives to create a disk of 5589.04 GB. When I install the OS (Windows 7 Pro) it created a 100 MB System Reserved partition and a 2047.90 GB main partition. That left 3541.04 GB unallocated and I cannot figure out how to make use of that space.
I tried creating a 2TB virtual disk, but that was not allowed because supposedly there was not enough space. I tried extending the partition, but I got the following message:
"Only the first 2TB are usable on large MBR disks. Can not create partitions beyond the 2TB mark, not convert the disk to dynamic."
So how the hell do I make use of that space?
Other Information from the Intel Rapid Storage Technology untilty:
System Information
OS Name: Microsoft Windows 7 Professsinal
OS Version: 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 7601
System Name: DEV_01
System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology co. Ltd.
System Model: H97M-D3H
Processor: GenuineIntel Intel64 Family 6 Model 60 Stepping 3 3.401 GHz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. F4
Intel Rapid Storage Technology
Kit installed: 13.0.3.1001
User Interface version: 13.0.3.1001
Language: English (United States)
RAID option ROM version: 13.0.0.2075
Driver version: 13.0.3.1001
ISDI version: 13.0.3.1001
Hardware Information
RAID Configuration
Array Name: SATA_Array_0000
Size: 7,630,915 MB
Available Space: 7 MB
Number of volumes: 1
Volume member: Local1
Number of array disks: 4
Array disk: WD-WCC4MNKXY98X
Array disk: WD-WCC4MLJE75X5
Array disk: WD-WCC4MLNSJ6XS
Array disk: WD-WCC4MLVN1NY7
Disk data cache: Enabled
Volume name: Local1
Status: Normal
Type: RAID 5
Size: 5,723180 MB
System Volume: Yes
Data stripe size: 64KB
Write-back cache: Off
Initialized: Yes
Parity errors: 90
Blocks with media errors: 0
Physical sector size: 4096 Bytes
Logical sector size: 512 Bytes
... There is more, but I think that this should be enough to work with.
Can anybody tell me how to access that unallocated space without having to reconfigure my drives?.