December 23, 2013 Dear Forum, I have a post in another forum if you want to see my setup: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=2319578#post2319578 however, I need to know which Paragon program I need to buy and to clarify a question. I'm sure you're aware that Toshiba bought out Hitachi. In PC World's "Everything You Need to Know About 3TB Hard Drives" http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3TB_hard_drives.html there is this statement: "Another differentiator between the drives turned out to be the software. Hitachi includes a driver/partitioning utility (from Paragon Software) that allows you to utilize all 3TB in a single partition. By contrast, as of this writing, the Acronis software favored by Seagate and WD allows you to use the entire drive capacity, but only in separate 2.2TB and 800GB partitions. To create a single volume, you need to follow the previously mentioned tip about combining partitions using Windows dynamic disks." Is the part "Hitachi includes a driver/partitioning utility (from Paragon Software) that allows you to utilize all 3TB in a single partition." referring to MBR or GPT? The PAT I downloaded from Toshiba for my 2TB PH3200U-1I72 http://storage.toshiba.eu/cms/en/support_services/advanced_format.html seems to just have the ability to "Align" the Toshiba and nothing else. I'm assuming (unfortunately) the PAT will ONLY make it GPT. Assuming that IS the case, does Paragon have ANY software to make my 3TB ALL MBR, as in the reply from TeraByte Unlimited: If you expose the 4K sector size and not the emulated normal 512 byte sector size, you can use an MBR and use the entire space (up to 16TiB). 0xFFFFFFFF*512=2,199,023,255,040 0xFFFFFFFF*4096=17,592,186,040,320 You may not be aware that Acronis makes software for Seagate and WD that allows full 3TB MBR access, but I'm not 100% sure I can trust it with my precious data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCLGfj1LSmI If someone could let me know these answers, I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance. Al
The End Is Here 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!
