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I am adding a new 6TB "WD Black" Western Digital drive. It shows two 2TB unallocated partitions.

Screenshot showing all the hard-drives' partitions

I have re-initialized both the partitions to GPT. It should have done the trick but it did not in my case. Restarted my computer but still I can't get past the two 2TB allocated partitions. I want to claim all the 6TB space on the hard drive as well as use it as a single drive.

FWIW, I connected the drive connected via USB using a hard drive enclosure.

Giacomo1968
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MidWestUser
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  • That is odd. Where did you get the drive from? – Mokubai Nov 20 '21 at 20:16
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    As if some layer (hardware RAID controller?) presented the physical disk as multiple volumes that masquerade as physical disks in front of your OS. Is there anything unusual in your hardware setup? – Kamil Maciorowski Nov 20 '21 at 20:24
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    It appears you are connecting the drives via USB. If this is a desktop system, can you try connecting it via sata and see if you can get different behaviour? Also it looks like this screenshot is from Paragon perhaps? What do you see when using Windows Disk Management? – spaceman-spiff Nov 20 '21 at 20:44
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    I wonder if that's one of those "smart" USB SATA adapters which split a >2TB disk into 2TB LUNs because they assume the computer (or TV, or whatever) only supports MBR and only 2TB disks... – u1686_grawity Nov 20 '21 at 21:01
  • 2 x 2TB is 4 TB .... where did the other 2TB go!? – Bravo Nov 20 '21 at 21:14
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    @spaceman-spiff Exactly! Not all external USB drive enclosures have bridge boards that can handle drives that are larger than 2TB in size. The [newly posted answer](https://superuser.com/a/1688652/167207) by the original poster confirms that direct connection via SATA solved the issue. – Giacomo1968 Nov 20 '21 at 23:40

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I had connected the drive connected via USB using a hard drive enclosure. I talked to WD customer service and was recommended to connect the drive using SATA cable.

When connected via SATA cable, it showed a single disk with two partitions. I was able to expand one partition to claim the full 6TB. Good now. Thanks for your responses.

Giacomo1968
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