On 16/02/2014 20:48, Paul wrote:
Jim wrote:

Hi guys thanks for your replies so far i'm in a real pickle here.
The drive is a new WD3TB Black, however it is only showing up in
recover software as 747GB, i need it to be able to show me what is on
the whole 3TB drive any idea folks?
I love these fat drives but when you loose em it's a nightmare.

Jim

Piece of cake. I've seen this, but it's a function of
the OS you're using. I get similar symptoms in Win2K.
(I have a 3TB WD Black.)

It also depends, on what you used to prepare the drive.
Western Digital provides a free copy of Acronis TIH, suitable
for installing the Extended Capacity Manager. Only problem is,
at some point in the past, I installed some other Acronis
software, it installed a driver, and the driver was not
removable. So the new software, could not install its driver.
This complicates the process of getting the
Extended Capacity Manager working.

I can promise you, that the data is still accessible. I was
able to access the upper 747GB, using a loopback mount in
Linux, using a little-known offset parameter. That allows
me to get to the partitions that might be hiding up near
the end. But to do that, I had a fairly good idea, what
the offset should be. It only took a little bit of searching,
by taking snapshots with "dd", to figure out where the file
system header was.

I doubt one of the older data recovery programs is going
to be entirely happy working on your problem. So perhaps
you can provide a few details of what you've tried, and
I'll see if I can jog my memory as to what I did to fix it.

I've worked with the Extended Capacity Manager twice,
and both experiences were horrible (blinding rage horrible).

The Acronis TrueImage Cleanup Utility is here. It
can remove the old driver, if one is present. The Acronis
staff thought you could not successfully write one of these,
but a user in one of their forums, showed them how.
(If the driver is uninstalled in the wrong order, it
would cause the OS to blue screen.)

http://kb.acronis.com/content/34876

A standalone driver package exists. When I installed
this in Windows 8.1 Preview for example, I was able
to use the entire 3TB of disk, just as I see it in
WinXP today. But the required metadata was already on
the disk, for that driver to use.

https://kb.acronis.com/system/files/...ksetup2013.zip


But what that doesn't do, is it doesn't do the
Extended Capacity Manager step. ECM writes a 256KB
chunk of metadata, at the 2TiB mark. The upper virtual
disk, appears just after that point. And both times I
worked with ECM, it *refused* to allow me to click the
button, and install. And I didn't keep careful notes,
with all the flailing I was doing, of what fixed it.

So bottom line is:

1) Your data isn't lost. It can be accessed from Linux, for
free, with a bit of work. The upper 747GB or whatever,
is treated like a big bitmap. The -o loop option in the
Linux mounter, allows a file system to be mounted on a
mount point. Even though Linux would not normally allow
access above 2TiB on an MBR disk, the offset in the loopback
mounter supports 64 bit numbers.

2) Depending on OS, the OSes behave stupidly, even when you
do things mostly right. I've tried cranking down the
first 2TB partition by small amounts, to get them to behave
better. But I think what was really ****ing off the OS,
was cylinder offsets (WinXP style) versus megabyte offsets
(Windows 7 style). The Extended Capacity Manager, was using
one style on the lower disk, and another on the virtual disk.

Acronis should be soundly whipped, for the mess they made there.
Not a pleasant experience at all, and double the work for
me that it should have been. Thank God they made that
Cleaner utility, or I'd still be swearing and tearing
out my hair!

Paul
Hi Paul thanks for the reply, boy is this a can of worms i wish i had
never opened and stuck with my smaller 1TB Blacks.

OK when i started using these 3TB drives i was coming up withthe 2.2TB
issue and suggested to use GPT or something like that but what i didn't
like was at the begining of the drive was a smaller 128mb hidden
partition so i wanted to find a way round it and format the drive
keeping it nice and clean and i used so many differnt apps to get it the
way I wanted i thinkn i used a free app from Paragon called "Paragon
partition manager free edition" but i can't be 100% to be hobnest on how
it was formated it could have been a number of way. i was going to
reformat it using GPT but thought better of it, as yet i have wrote
nothing to the dud drive. I know my data is there but getting it is not
straight forward.

I am running a new instal of win 7 U x64 to be honest i should be able
to get my hands on any of the latest software most offer shareware with
option to upgrade to recover so i'm happy to do that, i'm willing to buy
anything to get my data back.

Jim