backup and recovery 10 advanced workstation won't work with new large external HD

we just got a new Seagate 3TB external hard drive and I have worked with it about a dozen ways and it still won't work with B&R 10. I have tried using both Acronis disk management and windows 7 64 bit enterprise version to delete the partition and re initialize it in many ways. Win 7 is happy with the drive as a 2TB drive and I would be happy to get that much with B&R but B&R says the drive is alwasy healthy and unitialized no matter what. I tell it to initialized it and it always comes back as failed at either 33 or 50% but it has been untouched. I have had B&R try MBR and GPR basic and dynamic. always failed. I can go through it with win 7 and re initialize it and reformat it fine but still B&R won't work with it.
I have been in desktop support 26 years so I am not an inexperienced newbie.
any further info would be most appreciated.
even if I get 2TB working I would be happy for now.
we are using B&R booting off a CD to back up some computers to the external HD