I bought a Toshiba NAS 8TB internal HDD to upgrade from a 2TB that is almost full. Media Server recognized it as a new HDD, started to format it but stopped after a few seconds and put up a message that it couldn't do the job. So, here's how I fixed this after a couple of days trying other things that didn't work:
1 - Purchased two Sabrent HDD enclosures that connect to my PC with USB 3.0.
2 - Put the old HDD which was almost full into one enclosure and connected it to the PC with a USB cable.
3 - Put the new HDD into the second enclosure and connected like the first one.
4 - Turned on both enclosures and then opened "This PC" on my Windows 10 PC. Both HDD's were shown, along with the C drive, DVD ROM, etc.
5 - Using Acronis disk software, I "cloned" the old HDD on to the new HDD. This took 12 hours to completely copy, sector by sector, the files from one HDD to the other.
6 - After this was done, I took the new HDD and put it in the MS and it booted up fine and had all the movies from the old drive. But, the new drive was partitioned into two sections of about equal size. The MS settings disk management showed that there was not the full 8TB available.
7 - So, I reloaded the new HDD into the Sabrent enclosure and turned it on. Using Disk Management (Rt. click start button), I could see the two partitions on the new HDD.
8 - On the partition that was NOT the one with MS files on it, I did a Rt. click and selected Volume to Delete and then deleted it.
9 - On the volume I wanted to extend (to use the whole disk for movies) I did a Rt. click and chose Extend.
10 - A wizard opens and you just finish the process.
11 - I put the new HDD into the MS and it reflected the entire 8TB (actually a bit less due to binary data).
12 - The old HDD I'm saving as is to save for a rainy day if the 8TB ever goes bad, I have the old one to do this process again, if needed.
Good luck to all!
Lt. Carl
