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Disk Director 11 Home does not support WD 3 TByte external HDD

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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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I have the exact same thing happening. I also purchased two WD 3 TB drives. I am using Disk Director 10.
Under Windows 7, I used control panel disk management to format the drives with NTFS file system.
The appear as this in the disk management display, and they also show the amount of used and free space on the disk I have already copied
files to. The second disk is still empty, and it appears that way in Windows disk management.

What I am confused about is that the drives appear in disk director 10, but they show up with "none" for the file system, and they BOTH show as
totally empty, even though one of them has well over a Terabyte of data on it.

So I am wondering if there is something I neglected to do with my disks to correctly initialize them, or if Disk Director 10 just is not capable of
recognizing the characteristics of 3 Tb disks.

Can anyone tell me if i just can't use Disk Director to manipulate these 3 Tb drives?

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.

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.

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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