Seagate Backup Plus 4TB disappears when I try to backup
Hello,
I have bought a "Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Desktop External Hard Drive with Mobile Device Backup USB 3.0 (STDT4000100)".
The drive connects with USB 3.0 and I have Windows 8.1.
Whenever I try to backup, after ATI it starts doing it, I get an message saying the there was an error with the drive/it cannot be found (whereas it showed properly in Windows explorer before the backup attempt).
After that the drive is gone from Windows and I need to restarts the computer to have it appear again.
When I look at the content of the drive I see that the backup file was created, but has either 0kb or very few kb. So it seems the backup process starts correctly, but then for some reason the drive disconnects.
Besides that the drive seems to behave properly for non backup operations.
Any help, thoughts or leads would be appreciated.
Hi Shadowsports,
No, I didn't have to install anything to get the full capacity of the drive to detect and report itself correctly with my hardware. It was plug and play.
I haven't tried with the boot media yet, but that would defeat the purpose as I want to be able to back-up from my system.
My computer has only USB 3.0 ports.
Attached are a screenshot of my system and a zip file with the logs.
Thanks!
Hi Dellone,
This is what I believe is happening.
event id="1" level="3" module="57" code="52" time="1416066558" message="Failed to find information about operating system in Master Boot Record." line_tag="0xF5E7A826719852C8"
event id="3" level="3" module="57" code="7" time="1416066558" message="An invalid sector size." line_tag="0x5186AB5C3563A7AF" hide="1" /
Acronis is having problems with the AF on one of your disk(s). Can you confirm... OS disk is 2TB? GPT or MBR format. Not sure how Dell implements this. I would suspect the Seagate, but its not clear. Let me spend some time looking into this for you. Another MVP may reply in the meantime.
Hi Shadowsports,
My OS disk is 2TB and is GPT Format.
The Seagate Backup Plus 4TB is MBR.
FYI, I'm able to easily do backups on a LaCie-Rikiki 1TB drive which is also MBR, so I'm surprised the error would come from the OS disk -- but hey, you're the expert and I'm the clueless one ;-)
Attached are screenshots the show the size and format of each of the above mentioned drives.
Hi Shadowsports,
Searching some more on the Internet it seems that MBR only supports a maximum partition/drive size of 2TB (see attached screenshot from an Amazon review).
I think the Seagate native back-up software has specific workaround to work with its 4TB drive, but maybe ATI would need to have the Seagate drive formated as GPT.
I won't try anything before I hear back from you though.
Hi Dellone,
You are correct. The space above 2.2TB (MBR format, legacy BIOS) is emulated as a second MBR transparent to the OS. In your case, the Extended Capacity Manager is not needed as your OS supports MBR and GPT disks > 2.2TB. However, I think you will need to format the Seagate to GPT in order for the boot media, or boot environment to support the full 4TB capacity of the drive. I would do this in Disk Management and retest. If this doesn't work, I'll see about getting this on customer supports radar.
Hi Shadowsports,
So I formated the Seagate Drive to GPT and then attempted to make a Disk back-up with ATI 2014. Unfortunately I got the same error message. You can see the corresponding Logs attached.
Then I tried to make a Disk backup from a bootable DVD with ATI 2013.
Bizarrely the system was seeing the Seagate Drive as the (OS) C: drive while it saw the real OS drive as G:. This was even though I had attributed letter F: to the Seagate drive.
So then I did a File Backup (instead of a Disk Backup) of the entire OS G: drive to the Seagate C: Drive and it worked.
So apparently ATI can handle a 4TB drive when used from a bootable media. It would seem the problem comes more from Windows then. I think I read something about Windows turning off drives connected by USB 3.0, but I could not resolve it.
Any thoughts or suggestion would be appreciated.
Hi dellone,
Typically using Acronis "in-windows" would provide the best support for large disk. That said, some operations are performed in the Acronis boot environment, so in that case support may be limited to what the boot environment had at its release.
Support for some USB 3.0 chipsets has been spotty and in many cases a drive connected to this controller will perform at 2.0 speeds for compatibility reasons... However, if the chipset is supported you'll get support for "high-speed" transfers.
I'm not familiar with windows turning off disks connected to 3.0 interfaces. Not sure what you are referring to here?
Drive letters absolutely do change in the boot environment. This is because Linux interprets disks and controllers differently than windows. You did the right thing paying attention to the size of your partitions. Assigning a drive letter does not help in these situations. Assigning a partition or disk with a meaningful name does and can help to ensure a drive or partition can be easily identified in the boot environment.
Sometimes we read posts from users who don't understand why their hardware is not supported or why their disks are not properly detected in the boot environment ( I know you aren't one of them), but, as you know, its just not possible to provide support for every possible hardware type or system configuration on one little CD. Overall I believe Acronis does a pretty good job with the hardware support it provides. WinPE and BartPE are there when the boot CD doesn't work.
Hi Shadowsports,
Thanks for all your help and all the time you have taken to assist me.
I really appreciate it :-)
I'll look into getting hardware support directly from Acronis then.