How To Solve MBR Disk 2TB Partition Limit in Windows 8/8.1/7/Vista?

What is The Problem Concrete Manifestation?

When you buy a new disk, more than 2TB. But you can only see 2TB of disk space and cannot use the rest of the drive. Why can’t you have a partition larger than 2TB? As storage has gotten bigger and cheaper, more and more people come to this question when they upgrade their hard disk. Now it has become a common problem. Let me take a few minutes to talk about the mysterious 2TB limit. In fact, in a word, it is due to the type of initialization performed on the disk. Your disk is MBR type! The MBR supports up to 2TB per single partition. So you can only see and use 2TB in your computer.

How To Solve The Problem?

Now that you have known 2TB is the max volume in a MBR disk. I also want to tell you that there are two types of disk, another is called GPT(GUID Partition Table), a new partition/disk style, which support bigger than 2TB. So the solution is converting MBR to GPT? Yes, it is!

At first, verify that your computer equipped with UEFI if your system partition is in the pre MBR disk. The UEFI will show up in the bios. Second, it is about operating system requirements. You can consult the chart below.

Operating System	Data Access	System Boot
Windows XP 32-bit	Not Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows XP 64-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows Vista 32-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows Vista 64-bit	Support GPT	Support GPT(Need UEFI)
Windows 7 32-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows 7 64-bit	Support GPT	Support GPT(Need UEFI)
Windows 8 32-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows 8 64-bit	Support GPT	Support GPT(Need UEFI)

Everything seemed ready, now you need a tool to convert MBR to GPT. A Professional partition manager - AOMEI Partition Assistant is able to do this easily and safely.

AOMEI Partition Assistant has a professional feature called “Convert to GPT disk”. Concrete steps please visit here. After you have converted MBR to GPT, you can convert a FAT partition to NTFS. The result of Windows with NTFS and GPT is better overall performance.

More about AOMEI Partition Assistant

AOMEI Partition Assistant is an all-in-one partition software. Besides as a partition converter, it has many other practical functions: migrate OS to SSD/HDD, resize partition, merge partition, allocate free space, rebuild MBR. More function please visithere.