Disk Director 11 Home does not support WD 3 TByte external HDD
Until yesterday I did not experience any problems using Disk Director 11 home (DD). Unfortunately this has changed with the purchase of a WD 3 TByte external HDD which is well supported by Win 7 64 but not found by DD. I've tried to find information whether there is a limit in size supported by DD but I could not find any. 3 TB is a lot of space which I want to organize in smaller partitions - but DD fails in doing so. Does anybody have an idea how to make DD recognize this external HDD? Thank you in advance.

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lleiderm:
3 TB disks use the newer GPT (GUID partition table) scheme. Acronis Disk Director 10 supports the older MBR (Master Boot Record) scheme, which has a size limit of 2 TB. You can work with your GPT disk using Windows 7 tools, but not with Disk Director 10.
Disk Director 11 has some support for GPT disks but I have no experience with its features. The manual is confusing and there have been some posts indicating that all it can do is convert between GPT and MBR disks. If anyone has experience with using DD 11 with GPT disks, please chime in.
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Thanks so much, Mark. That is what I suspected. It is good to get some more detail on why I am seeing such a discrepancy between Windows Disk Management and what Acronis DD shows. I feel much more at ease now that it seems that I actually did initialize the disks properly.
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Nob and lleiderm:
I just finished doing some experiments with Disk Director 11 and GPT disks. I was able to initialize a disk as GPT, create and manipulate partitions using DD 11, and have Windows 7 correctly recognize the DD 11-created partitions. I did my experiments in a Windows 7 VMWare Virtual Machine using a virtual disk drive. When booting the VM with the DD 11 recovery media, all of the GPT partitions were recognized correctly and could be deleted, created, and re-sized in the recovery environment. True Image 12 was able to see and create an image of the GPT disk also. Based on this simple test, I conclude that DD 11 supports GPT disks correctly. A disclaimer is that I used a small virtual disk (40 GB) and did not test on a large (>2 TB) disk.
Here are some screen shots showing eight primary partitions on the GPT disk from DD 11, from Windows 7 Disk Management console, and from Windows Explorer.
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114140-104185.png | 91.75 KB |
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