Drive Support over 2.2TB

[engineerguy3809]

I'm a lucky user who still has a "legacy" (read that VERY OLD) XP-SP3 system with basic NTFS drives. I forgot about the native XP limitation for large drives and purchased a 3TB Seagate SATA drive which I wish to use in my external USB case for images and other external file storage. I know that Seagate offers DiscWizard which provides a driver to "trick" XP into support for the 3TB drives. However, will this work (I suspect not) if I use either a Linux Boot Disk or a PE boot? Since this is a driver for Windows, it would not be loaded if the drive was used with an alternate boot OS (such as Linux or PE). Ultimately, I would like to partition the drive into two parts. I've even tried patitioning and formatting the drive with the Linux PartEd utility, but XP still only recognizes a single 746GB drive. Another option would be to do all my imaging and restores under Linux. However, I also need to use the external drive as storage space under Windows. Is there any way to partition the 3TB drive so that it can be recognized by BOTH my Windows XP and my TeraByte Image apps?

If it helps with any possible solutions, I purchased the drive as a bare drive to ultimately install into my external case. For setup purposes, I can plug the bare drive directly into my system to configure and setup, and then move it to the external USB case when finished.

[TeraByte Support]

just keep your partitions under 2TiB since that is all the MBR supports.
You'd need a GPT which supports drives > 2TiB (dynamic drives do too, but
that is a proprietary layout and not supported).

"engineerguy3809" wrote in message news:3480@public.image...

I'm a lucky user who still has a "legacy" (read that VERY OLD) XP-SP3 system
with basic NTFS drives. I forgot about the native XP limitation for large
drives and purchased a 3TB Seagate SATA drive which I wish to use in my
external USB case for images and other external file storage. I know that
Seagate offers DiscWizard which provides a driver to "trick" XP into support
for the 3TB drives. However, will this work (I suspect not) if I use either
a Linux Boot Disk or a PE boot? Since this is a driver for Windows, it
would not be loaded if the drive was used with an alternate boot OS (such as
Linux or PE). Ultimately, I would like to partition the drive into two
parts. I've even tried patitioning and formatting the drive with the Linux
PartEd utility, but XP still only recognizes a single 746GB drive. Another
option would be to do all my imaging and restores under Linux. However, I
also need to use the external drive as storage space under Windows. Is
there any way to partition the 3TB drive so that it can be recognized by
BOTH my Windows XP and my TeraByte Image apps?

If it helps with any possible solutions, I purchased the drive as a bare
drive to ultimately install into my external case. For setup purposes, I
can plug the bare drive directly into my system to configure and setup, and
then move it to the external USB case when finished.

[TeraByte Support]

Oh, yeah, you could perhaps also setup RAID on that drive and provision off
two different containers one being 2TiB and one being 1TiB - it would appear
to be two physical drives.

"TeraByte Support" wrote in message news:3490@public.image...

just keep your partitions under 2TiB since that is all the MBR supports.
You'd need a GPT which supports drives > 2TiB (dynamic drives do too, but
that is a proprietary layout and not supported).

"engineerguy3809" wrote in message news:3480@public.image...

[engineerguy3809]

Thanks for the reply but can you clarify the situation a bit for me? Within Windows XP, I did attempt to create two partitions of about 1.5TB in order to stay belopw the 2.2TB maximum. However, Windows insisted the physical drive was limited to about 746GB in size and did not display any unpartitioned or unused space beyond that. I then looked at the drive using PartED/Linux and I can easily partition & format accordingly. As such, I know the drive is not defective. Next, I created & formated two NTFS partitions of about 1.5 TB using PartEd. However, when I restart XP and looked at the drive, XP still insists it can only "see" a maximum usable space of 746 GB and nothing beyond that. Can you further clarify what I'm missing and what I need to do?

[Brian K]

Delete the second partition and leave the first 1.5 TB partition. Does WinXP now see a 1.5 TB partition?

[engineerguy3809]

Thanks for the reply.
OK . . . . . I combined your request with some additional information that might be useful.
To start with a clean, empty drive, I used a disk utility to wipe the partition table and the system sectors of the disk. Under Windows Disk Management, I was able to create and format a 1.5TB partition. However, Disk Management did NOT indicate ANY unallocated space was available beyond the initial 1.5TB partition I had just created. It appeared as if I had a 1.5TB physical drive with all space partitioned as a single drive. By itself, this would lose 50% of the usable capacity of the drive. Having nothing to lose, I then booted to PartEd/Linux and it saw the remaining 1.5TB unallocated space beyond the first partition (as I would expect). While still running PartEd, I then allocated the remaining space as a 2nd partition and formatted it as NTFS. PartEd saw two NTFS partitions of approximately 1.5TB each (again, as expected). I then rebooted into Windows and Disk Management now sees only a single 746.51GB for the initial partition and nothing whatsoever beyond. Now I'm REALLY confused. If I had a BIOS limitation, I wouldn't expect Windows couldn't have been able to create the first 1.5TB partition at all. Do you have explanation as to what is going on and what I might do from here? If possible, all I am really trying to do is create and format two 1.5TB NTFS partitions without any special Windows drivers.

[Brian K]

Think of it this way. Only the initial 2 TB of your HD is usable. Once you have a partition that extends beyond the 2 TB mark you are in trouble.

So you can have a 2 TB partition or two 1 TB partitions, but you can't have both a 1 TB and a 1.5 TB partition. It is a MBR limitation.

[engineerguy3809]

Brian,
Thanks . . . that explains it. (I'm not happy about it, but it explains it.) I should have thought it thru before purchasing drive.

[Brian K]

OK. When you move on to Win7 you can use the full 3 TB by creating GPT partitions. WinXP can't see these partitions.

[engineerguy3809]

Brian, you read my mind; that was my next question.
However, that leaves me with another question.
Once I switch to GPT partitioning, can a boot from Linux Restore-CD or from Win-PE see all partitions and data?