Extending a volume, formatting?

[giomach]

Take a brand new 2TB hard disk, and create a volume of 500GB and format it (NTFS).  Now extend the volume by another 500GB, to 1TB.  Does the extra 500GB need to be formatted? If so, can this be done without reformatting the first 500GB?

Briefly, why I'm doing this: I can't make the volume 2TB from the start, because formatting this much at once (using Disk Management) has never got beyond 54% before failing (program stops writing to disk).  So I though of extending and formatting it in sections, but I don't see how to do this.

(Windows Vista, 32-bit.)

[patio]

Not sure why Vista wouldn't do this nativelly...try Easus Partition Manager Free Edition for the Task at hand

[giomach]

Thanks for replying, patio.

I found a few other useful pages where people reported that Windows Disk Management would not format their 2TB disks beyond 54%:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-hardware/formating-issues-with-a-wd-2tb-drive-cant-format/17f887ee-7689-4dc3-9237-ee7f3af2dfbd
http://www.maximumpc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=104461
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/206391en?popup=true

It seems the problem is mainly/solely confined to Vista (it's not clear whether or not XP is affected), and to machines with certain NVidia motherboards, from around 2008.  The solution proposed by several people was to update the drivers for the SATA controller on the motherboard.  I had to do this manually since both Windows and the NVidia website utility were convinced that my drivers were up to date, and it was not easy to find the right driver for my version of Windows and my model of motherboard at the NVidia site.

Another concern was to know what the very large downloaded .exe would do when run.  In fact, it asks you what directory you want to unpack all the drivers to, and then lets you tick which sets of drivers you want to install.  I think there were four groups, I ticked only "storage" drivers, and they were installed.  Now, just over five hours later, the disk is formatted to full size and I hope to start using it.

An alternative solution which was claimed to work was the same one suggested by patio, to format using Easus Partition Manager, though I wonder how that could get around a defect in the drivers?  But the person who proposed it was talking about XP, I think.  Anyway I thought it would be best to try updating the drivers first, and it worked.