Ran a Write Test and it Created Two Partitions

[yakkityak]

Hi,

I ran the surface test (Write Test) on my 4TB Hard Drive and once it had completed (without any errors) I went into disk management and it was showing as two partitions, the first 2048GB and the second 1678.02GB. I have attached a screenshot.

Is this normal? Do you know why it would do this as opposed to making it one partition of approx. 3.7GB?

Thank you!

[hdsentinel]

No, I can confirm that the write test *never* creates any partitions.

The write test clears all data from all sectors (including partition information, Master Boot Record and so).
Then, by default, Windows may show a high capacity disk drive this way: as this way you can create a single MBR partition (which has a limit of 2 TB capacity) in order to use with older systems (so generally for compatibility).

If you prefer to "combine" and use the whole capacity, then first you need to convert the drive to a GPT disk drive:
Please right click on the left section where you can see "Disk 0 Basic" and from the popup menu, select "Convert to GPT disk" option, as displayed on this image:



Then the complete capacity will be displayed - and you can create any partition(s) on the disk drive.

[yakkityak]

Strangely enoungh it actually showed it as one partition after I restarted windows:

cat.PNG (4.83 KiB) Viewed 1680 times

Good to know what was happening though. Thanks for the help.