Cloning to 4TB USB drive

David Boyd wrote:

Hi,

Today I tried to clone my PC's hard drive to a 4TB Seagate USB drive (actually Windows reports it as 3.63TB). The drive appears in the True Image drive list, but when I try and select it as a destination drive it greys out. I have Seagate 2TB drives that work fine, but this 4TB drive can't be selected.

This could possibly be part of the legacy Windows operating systems not supporting drives greater than 2TB, however I'm running I'm running Windows 8.

Assistance appreciated.

David

I'm having the same problem. I suspect it has to do with the USB 3.0 adapter that the Seagate drive uses in the enclosure (there's a standard Seagate 3.5" drive inside the enclosure connected to this adapter). This adapter uses some sort of trickery to allow the Seagate drive to use a MBR partition that Windows recognizes as a single 4TB partition (which shouldn't be possible given that MBR partitions have a maximum size of 2.2TB). I believe it's something the adapter is doing that causes Acronis to think it doesn't have a standard 4KB logic sector size. From what I've read, Acronis won't clone drive-to-drive unless both drives have the same logic sector size:

http://kb.acronis.com/content/45437

It's just a theory at this point. I'm going to research further and do more testing.

EDIT: By the way, I'm using Acronis True Image Home 2014 Build 6673 (most current build), so this isn't something that only has to do with older versions of Acronis.

Okay, so here's what I'm concluding from my research:

My first assumption was close to the mark, but in reverse. The larger Seagate External USB 3.0 drives (3TB, 4TB) are disabling the 512 sector emulation on their drives with their USB-to-SATA adapters that are inside the enclosure so that the OS sees a 4KB native sector size. I think they do this because by having a 4KB native sector size the drive is able to format with a single MBR partition. This allows these larger drives to be read with Windows XP. If 512 sector emulation were enabled and the OS detected the logical sectors as 512 then in order to format the entire drive with a single partition you'd need to use GPT and GPT is completely unreadable by Windows XP.

So, basically, if you're using a 4TB external Seagate USB 3.0 drive like me and you want to clone it to or from a 4TB internal drive ... you're screwed. The solution is to use a Western Digital external USB 3.0 drive instead so that you can format it with the WD Quick Formatting Tool and enable the 512 sector emulation.

Seagate, if you're reading this, I have one thing to say to you: you suck. If Western Digital provides a way to make this work then you should too.