3TB’s Partitioned As NTFS With MBR Out There?

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Guys,

Windows 7 Pro SP1 64-Bit with an ASRock P67 PRO3 (B3) MoBo

that has a UEFI BIOS, i5-2500K and Corsair Vengeance 16 Gigs.

My C, D and E partitions are on a 120 GB NTFS SSD with a MBR.

My present STORAGE HDD is a 2TB Toshiba with a MBR.

I recently purchased a Toshiba PH3300U-1I72 3TB to replace the 2TB.

I always Ghost with DOS Bootable CDs I make with custom

Autoexec.bat files I write, never Windows.

I found out from Symantec that Ghost has issues with GPT.

I found a way to make my 3TB FULLY accessible and set as MBR.

It’s Acronis True Image, aka Seagates DiskWizard aka WD’s version

of DiskWizard. It puts an “Extended Capacity Manager” in the boot

sector so you get one 2.1TB and one 700+GB partition, BOTH MBR.

See: Seagate DiscWizard CloneDisc for drives larger than 3TB_Part-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCLGfj1LSmI

I just found this and would like some input before opening the

Toshiba 3TB’s box:

Make SURE the 3TB is EMPTY as this will wipe ALL data on the drive

To make a fully accessible 3TB with 4k sector:

1. Boot to desktop.

2. Open “My Computer” in Windows Explorer.

3. Click on the EMPTY 3TB HDD.

4. If the factory made some partitions on it, delete them all.

5. Once it is just one disk, right-click it and click “Format”

6. Select “4096”, “NTFS” and “Format”.

7. Click OK. Since the 3TB is EMPTY, it should be real quick.

8. It’s now ready to be partitioned to your liking up to 2.7 or so

TB’s total and is set as MBR.

The reason that I’m posting this is to get feedback from anyone who

has used these programs or the “4096”, “NTFS” and “Format” method

to see if the 3TBers work as any other HDD would or are there any

quirks that have come up since partitioning your 3TB?

Please post to me.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Big Al

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If you’re just using it as a storage drive and backing that up on a file basis it’ll probably work great. Any sort of imaging program might be tossed for a loss as to how to handle an extended capacity manager. I can’t say for sure but back in the ancient days when we had to use something similar for a little while to see “big” drives exceeding 137 gigs I think, there were certain limitations then also.
Best to stick with GPT methinks and use a different program that fully understands GPT. That way you also get all the partitions you want without resorting to an extended partition. Since I use a lot of XP I avoid this particular snafu by using USB externals if the drive is too large for MBR. The USB bridge handles everything for me and I’m looking at a 2794.49 GB NTFS MBR partition in XP right now. I have not however made any attempt to look at the drive through an imaging program. I only assume it would look the same.

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Sorry to say that I’ve heard from numerous people with 3+ TB’s

and they have grave reservations about Acronis/Seagate/WD’s

Extended Capacity Manager to get full MBR 3TB HDD’s and they

say that the “4096”, “NTFS” and “Format” won’t work.

Well, I HATE to admit defeat, but since I CANNOT find the

Ghost v11.5.1.2298 from GSS 2.5.1 that DOES see GPT HDD’s,

I’ve concluded that my only recourse is to relegate my 3TB to

GPT and to BACKUP status to my 2TB Toshiba and dusted-off 1TB

Hitachi MBR HDD’s that I’ll be using as my main drives.

After numerous E-Mails to a bunch of Cloning Software companies,

I’ve settled on MiniTool Partition Wizard v8.1.1 from

http://www.partitionwizard.com (To top it off, it’s FREE!!!)

to pre-partition my 3TBer and to do the “Copy partitions from

my 1 and 2TB MBR’s to partitions on my 3TB GPT” and use my

Ghost v11.5.1.2269’s Make and Restore Bootable CD’s to do my

MBR C and D Drive imaging chores.

It’s been fun–NOT!

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Ok guys, first step, and I am not an advocate however this has worked.

Situation: i have a 3TB NAS *(GoFlex Home) Network Attached Storage.
Inside of said NAS there is an instance of seagate arch linux (hipserv) running in it , which is really pogoplug in disquise.

After re-initializing the device using the USB key firmware flash method( hard drive was on the system when i did this Ooops) it deleted and corrupted the partition.

I browsed around the device for so long that I finally called Seagate at their 1800 Seagate number and the guy on the phone(tech support guy). Said that this was a proprietary
method of how to format this system and that he couldnt help me other than to say the following.

Seagate NAS, GoFlex Home and other devices use MBR as their partition format and any drive over 2TB is not capable of being formatted to 3TB and he cannot tell me how the drive came pre-formatted with an MBR and it having a total capacity of 3TB.

So after a long heated debate on why he could not tell me or provide support for a device and product which was distributed by seagate I had an epiphany.

Well if Seagate can do it I can to.

So i browsed around and i remembered that Seagate has a free utility called DiskWizard.

I donwloaded DiskWizard from here
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/discwizard/

and I attached the drive to my computer using a simple USB adapter *(seagate goflex desk adapter)

and I decided to play around with it a little (no harm done since seagate already lost all of my data for me).

What I found was a very simple fix and here are the steps to re-create.

Go to Add New Disk ( which will add a new disk to the system).

select the drive that you are wanting to make this massive 3TB Partition on.

click next,

now This is the tricky part, instead of clicking next again look at the top and select Create Partition from the little box up at the top of the window.

Make a 3TB partition (use all of the space).

Now simply go to the next step and select MBR, (if you want to boot make it active).

and let it run through the process, and re-attach it to the seagate goflex base when you are done and restart the device (power off and power on).

Whala the light goes green.

I havnt had any problems with the disk since and I am not going to attempt to flash any more seagate products unless i get one out of a junkyard first so I can send it back to the junkyard when the firmware utilitiy bricks the device.

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My C, D and E partitions are on a 120 GB NTFS SSD with a MBR. My present STORAGE HDD is a 2TB Toshiba with a MBR. I recently purchased a Toshiba PH3300U-1I72 3TB to replace the 2TB.

Since you’re not running an OS on the 2TB drive there is absolutely NO reason to use cloning. Cloning is necessary only to move/copy an existing OS partition. With data partitions you need only to copy the files.

There also is no compelling reason to insist on MBR partitioning for the 3TB. Win7 understands and works fine with GPT without the need to resort to non-standard and proprietary kludges like Acronis’ “Extended Capacity Manager”. I studied ECM several years ago to see how it operated, and came away very unimpressed. There’s no way I would ever let it near any of my hard disks. It should only be used as a last resort if there is absolutely no other option, and even then I wouldn’t use it.

Win7 works fine with GPT, so as F.U.N. said, stick with GPT. You can mix MBR and GPT disks, so your MBR boot disk is fine to leave as is. You’re not booting from the GPT disk so do not make any changes to your BIOS setup. Let it keep booting up as a MBR system and let Win7, not the BIOS, be responsible for dealing with the GPT disk.

Partition the 3TB with one or more GPT partitions. If you have the 2TB and 3TB installed at the same time Win7 can just do a straight copy of all files from the 2TB to wherever you want them on the 3TB. Then you can remove the 2TB and leave the 3TB in its place.

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Yes, totally no need for MBR on these 2TB and 3TB drives.
Move the contents of “D”, and “E” to the TB drives, no need to clone anything, copy will do just fine.

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