David, Is the drive showing up at all in Windows 7? As it is a data drive only, you need only initialise the disk as GPT, then create your 3TB partition. You don't need to worry about the alignment. If you are using it as a boot drive, then you need to use an UEFI BIOS. If you can't see the disk using Disk Manager or Diskpart, then something else is wrong. Can the BIOS see the disk? Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of David Mehler Sent: 26 December 2013 16:23 To: blind-sysadmins Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Preparing a 3TB drive Hello, To anyone with a 3TB internal or external drive, though internal is what I'm dealing with. This is going to be in a system running windows7sp1, which is not detecting the drive. I've read that the drive needs to be prepared outside of windows, partitioned gpt and formatted ntfs then windows will see it. I have also read about drive alignment and that this is crucial on larger drives and also the 4k boundaries on these larger drives instead of 512 byte boundaries. The end result is I'm a little confused. The primary goal of these drives are going to be Windows data storage drives, with probably some Linux systems talking to them as well again for data storage. I want to ensure that all operating systems can see them, that they are properly aligned, and have the correct 4k boundaries set. What all do you use for this? Thanks. Dave. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins