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Dell Optiplex 745 and 3TB HDD
Hi all,
I recently purchased a 3TB drive and I have a Dell Optiplex 745. I want to install Windows 7 on the 3TB drive. Windows won't allow me to use all the space. I researched it for a while and found out that I needed a BIOS that has UEFI. I looked all over the BIOS and couldn't find it. I also couldn't find any info on the motherboard stating it had it or not. The BIOS does show the full 3TB so I'm not sure if thats UEFI capable or not.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Rob
jackshack
6.4K Posts
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January 21st, 2012 19:00
I'm afraid that the Optiplex 745 is a bit too old to have incorporated UEFI support. A look at the User's Guide and the BIOS updates for the machine make no mention of UEFI. Lacking that you will be unable to boot from a 3 TB disk, although you could still use the drive as a data drive.
The computer itself has hardware support for hard disk drives much greater than 3 TB. The problem is with the Master Boot Record scheme of partitioning; it is not possible to partition a drive using MBR larger than 2 TB. Instead it is necessary to use the GPT partitioning process. Windows 7, both 32 bit and 64 bit, can partition a drive using the GPT, but it is not possible to use such a drive as the system drive on an Optiplex 745 because the BIOS is designed to find the boot information on an MBR drive, not GPT.
NZ_Fresh
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November 19th, 2013 13:00
I have a similar question, trying to install WIndows 7 64 bit on an Optiplex 780 SFF with a 4TB drive. The BIOS after hitting F12 looks like UEFI (GUI with mouse support), but I cannot find any options to boot in UEFI mode and the windows install keeps telling me that it can't install on GPT formatted drive. I am on an older bios (A04, newest is A15 I think), but don't know if that makes a difference. Can someone tell me if the Optiplex 780 is UEFI capable?
speedstep
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47K Posts
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November 19th, 2013 13:00
You can do it on the mini tower when using a 3rd party Controller.
However you can only boot with 64 bit versions of windows due to 2TB limit on MBR.
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/beyond-2tb/
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