Disk Director 10 says "no file system" for properly-working NTFS partition

Hello? Any ideas?? I realize it's only been about 2 business days since my original post (depending upon where you are) , but I'm getting close to the deadline for returning the drive fro refund, and this all seems very strange.

With the Windows XP disk management utilities everything about the drive and partition seem fine and recognized as expected. Is ADD 10 perhaps incompatible with 1 TB drives, or with Iomega in general?

The drive had a virtual CD which I thought might be causing problems for Acronis, but I followed Iomega's instructions to remove it. And I am NOT using to encryption feature offered with this drive. It is a USB 3.0 drive, but is backwards compatible with 2.0 (which is how I'm using it).

Any help from one of the experts -- or anyone else -- would be GREATLY appreciated!

What build of DD 10 are you using? If it's not the latest, you could give it a try and see if it works.

What format options did DD offer for the new DD partition? Does it let you create a FAT32 partition?

Do you have the same problem if you boot to the DD CD? Possibly it's Windows related.

The red "X" usually means that DD is detecting something wrong, corrupted, or unexpected with the partition. Sometimes cleaning/wiping a drive can help if it's somthing with the drive's configuration (not the partition).

Can you post a screenshot of what Disk Management shows as well as one of what DD shows? It may help to see them.

Thanks for the reply.

First of all I checked and I did not have the latest version of ADD 10. I updated to it (v 10.0.0.2288) but the results are the same (other than the minor detail that the Red X now looks like a Red C, in the same position). Requested screenshots attached (two are identical, except that I've shown different parts of the Properties detail).

FAT32 is not offered as a format option. The choices given are Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, Linux Swap, and None.

Problem is the same with the CD.

I had already tried a low level format of the partition in Disk Management. Would that count as cleaning/wiping the drive? If not exactly what do you suggest as the best way to do this, and do you think it might really be advantageous over the low-level format of the partition?

Are you running XP SP3?

Is the space shown normally as Unallocated if you delete the existing partition?

Can you create a smaller NTFS partition (250GB, for example)?

Disk Management formatting doesn't count as cleaning. The "clean" feature was implemented in Vista (it's a DISKPART function) and is an easy way to "reset" a drive. You could try starting a Wipe on the drive using DD and then canceling it after several minutes (no need to wipe the entire drive). Make sure you wipe the drive and not just a partition since you want to clear the starting sectors.

Does DD see other USB hard drives correctly?

DD sees all my other USB drives properly (about 6 of them, both NTFS and FAT32). The largest is 500gb (again, the Iomega is 1 TB).

Yes, the space is normally shown as "Unallocated" if I delete the existing partition.

I've already tried creating smaller partitions, but DD still doesn't offer NTFS as a choice. In fact, I've also created smaller partitions with Windows Disk Management to see if DD recognizes them as expected, but the result in DD is the same as with one full-drive sized partition.

Per your suggestion I tried wiping the drive (not just a partition) for a few minutes, but that didn't help.

Any other ideas? Thanks.

You could try wiping the entire drive.

Is it the same if you create a Logical partition instead of a Primary partition?

Do you have any version of TI installed? If so, what version and build? Also, does the Add Disk Wizard have the same problem as DD?

Is it possible that the internal encryption is somehow enabled even though you think it's turned off?

After creating a partition with Disk Management, use DD's Disk Editor to view the partition's boot sector. Please post a screenshot of this. To do this, right-click on the partition in DD and select Advanced | Edit. When the editor appears it should be displaying the first sector of the partition. Press F2 to view in Hex mode. Resize the window as necessary to display the entire sector. Take a screenshot.

Thanks for the additional ideas. These extra suggestions may take awhile to test. I also *may* decide it's not worth the investigation time and just return the drive for a different model, since all the others I've used seem to work fine with ADD (and in every other respect). Thanks again.

The screenshot wouldn't take long and it would tell if DD is seeing the data as encrypted or not.

OK, attached are the screenshots from the editor. It is in 3 parts. This is for a full-drive NTFS partition created in XP disk management.

Unfortunately, I don't have TI.

BTW, I did try doing a Logical partition before, and the result was the same.

The screenshots help a lot. The drive is using 4KB sectors instead of 512B. DD 10 won't see it or read it correctly and so it can't determine the file system info.

There's nothing wrong with the drive. Just don't use DD to do the partitioning. I did some testing on a 3TB USB drive and the results were the same. Also, neither DD 11 or DD 11 AW see the drive correctly either (they don't even see the partition).

This KB article has a little info on the subject.

Thanks, MudCrab! That solves it. I can't tell how you saw the 4KB logical sector size from the editor's Hex view, but it shows it very clearly in the "As NTFS Boot Sector" view. Specifically, it shows "Sector Size (512): 4096." While if I look at a partition on one of my other drives (that work OK with DD), it says "Sector Size (512): 512."

I'll probably exchange the drive anyway since I not only want to be able to use ADD, but AFAIK there might be other programs/utilities I have that are incompatible with a 4KB logical sector.

Thanks again for helping me solve this mystery. Nice to have an issue that's *not* urgent for a change :).