Can't install Windows 7 on 3TB drive

[Vollezar]

I got myself a 3TB drive today and was going to install Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit on it. I have an ASRock h61m-hvs motherboard and it, supposedly, supports 3TB drives booting. So I initiated the drive as GPT and started installation from EFI. The installation goes through just fine, but on reboot I get an 0X000025 error. I tried installing twice and all to the same error. attempted to initialize the drive as an MBR partition but that only gives me 2TB and a 745GB partitions. 745 GB partition cannot be used for some reason. Don't know what else I can do.
Any suggestions.
My main drive is about to die so I have to do something but I don't want to loose nearly a terabyte of space.

 

[gbhall]

The thing that suggests to me is you need to include drivers for the 3TB drive, and windows will not run without them.

This is so similar to the endless requests we used to get when people tried to reinstall XP from an install disc when they had the (new then) SATA drives. Just as you are now finding, the CD would cheerfully copy, but at the first reboot, when the OS used Windows drivers for the fist time, XP had no SATA drivers and just locked up.

The solution was to include SATA drivers as part of the install CD, or include them via a specific process early during the installation process. I am sorry I do not know the specific route for including required drivers during a Win 7 install, but I assume someone does, and will step in here.....

 

[Vollezar]

Thanks. I thought that as well. After googling for a bit I found that the steps I took seem to be the most suggested and seemed to have worked for most people. Seems that making the drive a GPT and booting installation from EFI is all that's needed. For most people, anyway.

 

[gbhall]

Obviously the 2Tb thing must be significant - it is the maximum possible size of an NTFS drive as discussed here http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/bf3c0e74-ecc8-4c41-be3f-535b23c6ff3c. Now I know what you are talking about (GPT, UEFI etc) which I did not before. So the link off the last one descibes more detail http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx

Apparently, what you are doing should work, provided you manually intialise the drive before running the Win7 setup, and if it does not, you need an update to your bios firmware (argue the toss with ASrock), or failing that, are out of luck (suffering the earlier-adopter syndrome common to MS users ). One approach might be to eliminate the requirement to boot from the big drive. Maybe have a smaller SSD drive to boot from, and the big one just for data?

 

[Vollezar]

I think it does. Because it allowed me to boot the installation disk from EFI. I sent them a question asking if it does or not nonetheless. Will update when and if they answer.