Acronis 2019 Rescue CD doesn't recognize WD 6 GB USB drive not recognized
My older Windows 7 x64 doesn't have UEFI support. I recently purchased the WD My Book 6 GB USB drive.
Everything is fine and Windows detects the drive once my system is fully booted. Unfortunately, the BIOS and Acronis Backup/Restore CD does not recognize the drive.
I tried creating all possible startup discs but none of which will result in the HD being recognized. It's not even an option during boot options, but smaller USB drives are.
Are there any strategies to create a backup CD or DVD and install the necessary Windows files so the 6 GB can be recognized and I can backup my desktop drive onto the WD My Book USB drive?


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Ditto to Steve. There may be no way to force the bios to pick up the full 6TB as a single destination in a legacy Window's OS where the bios only supports legacy/MBR. This is a limitation of legacy mode and requires the disk be initialized as GPT.
Are you able to verify if it is MBR or GPT? If you can initialize as GPT, you may still be able to use the full amount so long as it's not a boot disk (which it can't be anyway if it's USB)
Try a third party tool, but to convert, may require the licensed version (such as minitool partition wizard).
Alternatively, use diskpart /clean on it and then disk management to initialize as GPT and NTFS if it let's you. This will wipe the drive though!!!
Please see this MS article
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Thanks guys. I was hoping to there was a way to create a slipstream type DVD or CD that would have all the Windows 7 drivers available that would allow the USB drive to be recognized. Sorry, it was a typo. I meant 6 TB, not GB.
I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon to Win 10. I tried it out when we had the free offer from Microsoft. It slowed my system down. When I first had it built, it was a mid-high range PC. It's still going strong today and fits my needs well. Perhaps in a several years I might switch when I get a new laptop, but I do not have any plans in the near future.
Unfortunately, the the EXFAT drive is more than half full now. I couldn't convert it NTFS without losing any of its contents.
I guess my only workaround is to use my portable 3 GB drive and backup my desktop hard drive to there and then copy the .tib file onto my WD 6 TB. A lot of time wasted there, but I guess that's all I can do considering the limitations I am facing with.
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I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon to Win 10. I tried it out when we had the free offer from Microsoft. It slowed my system down. When I first had it built, it was a mid-high range PC. It's still going strong today and fits my needs well.
The good news here if you installed and activated Windows 10 previously on this same computer is that you could still go that route and the activation recognised.
I would recommend considering doing a clean install of Windows 10 to check out the performance as this should be superior to upgrading from an older OS such as Windows 7. This would need you to reinstall your applications etc but you could port your user data across easily.
Personally, I would get hold of a spare disk drive to test Windows 10 with, ideally, an SSD for best performance.
I am running Windows 10 on some very old / ancient 64-bit hardware in comparative terms and can say that it runs better than my older Windows 7 did, and is worlds apart from how Vista performed on the same hardware (that it came installed with!).
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