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Help on max number of hard drives



 
 
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  #1  
Old February 4th 14, 07:32 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Jim[_38_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 58
Default Help on max number of hard drives

I'm running a straight forward Win 7 U x64 machine allbeit with now 10
hard drives I have tried to initialize and partition a couple of new
drives but it just comes up with errors saying i need to convert to gpt
or gpd (sorry can't remember what one) i rebooted with a bootcd for an
app called mini tool partition wizard home v6.0 and it will format to
ntfs but its size is only 2048gb and 746 is unallocated, if i convert to
this format called GPT it makes a hidden partition of 128mb and a data
partition of 2794GB.

My question is why can't i just format like i used to with drives C, D,
E, F etc? Is this GPT safe to use in windows and apps like Acrinics true
image or do i need to buy another bit of software to format these new
drives.

Jim
  #2  
Old February 4th 14, 11:14 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default Help on max number of hard drives

Jim wrote:
I'm running a straight forward Win 7 U x64 machine allbeit with now 10
hard drives I have tried to initialize and partition a couple of new
drives but it just comes up with errors saying i need to convert to gpt
or gpd (sorry can't remember what one) i rebooted with a bootcd for an
app called mini tool partition wizard home v6.0 and it will format to
ntfs but its size is only 2048gb and 746 is unallocated, if i convert to
this format called GPT it makes a hidden partition of 128mb and a data
partition of 2794GB.

My question is why can't i just format like i used to with drives C, D,
E, F etc? Is this GPT safe to use in windows and apps like Acrinics true
image or do i need to buy another bit of software to format these new
drives.

Jim


GPT is for drives over 2TB in capacity. It allows
you to take a 3TB or 4TB drive, and use the entire
thing for one partition.

Go back and look at C, D, E, F. Are any of them
bigger than 2TB ? Or were those drives smaller ?
If they're smaller, then legacy MBR is sufficient
and that's what we've been using on the older OSes.

I expect if you install enough hard drives, eventually
you could run out of letters for the partitions.
I presume someone has a clever solution for that.
You see, there have been people who do "stupid
pet tricks" with hard drives, like install every
OS in existence on the drive, use a whole bunch
of logical partitions, and people like that would
likely use up all the drive letters (A to Z). I
don't know what comes after Z :-)

Paul
  #3  
Old February 4th 14, 11:46 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Loren Pechtel[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 427
Default Help on max number of hard drives

On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 18:32:15 +0000, Jim
wrote:

I'm running a straight forward Win 7 U x64 machine allbeit with now 10
hard drives I have tried to initialize and partition a couple of new
drives but it just comes up with errors saying i need to convert to gpt
or gpd (sorry can't remember what one) i rebooted with a bootcd for an
app called mini tool partition wizard home v6.0 and it will format to
ntfs but its size is only 2048gb and 746 is unallocated, if i convert to
this format called GPT it makes a hidden partition of 128mb and a data
partition of 2794GB.

My question is why can't i just format like i used to with drives C, D,
E, F etc? Is this GPT safe to use in windows and apps like Acrinics true
image or do i need to buy another bit of software to format these new
drives.

Jim


This has nothing to do with the number of drives you have. Rather,
it's a result of you using a 3tb drive. You have to use the newer
partitioning scheme with drives (or arrays) 2tb.
  #4  
Old February 4th 14, 11:46 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Loren Pechtel[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 427
Default Help on max number of hard drives

On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 17:14:14 -0500, Paul wrote:

I expect if you install enough hard drives, eventually
you could run out of letters for the partitions.
I presume someone has a clever solution for that.
You see, there have been people who do "stupid
pet tricks" with hard drives, like install every
OS in existence on the drive, use a whole bunch
of logical partitions, and people like that would
likely use up all the drive letters (A to Z). I
don't know what comes after Z :-)


Windows won't care if you run out of letters, it just won't let you
assign a letter to the drive. You can still mount it in a folder,
though. Drive free space reports are bogus in that case (you'll
always get the free space of the drive it's mounted in) and there seem
to be some setup bugs with sharing but it otherwise works. (I have a
backup box with multiple drives mounted in C:\Backup which is then
shared--this means it uses only one drive letter on any system that's
accessing it. If I change the configuration I have to unshare the
directory, share the new volume on it's own, then put it in the folder
and share the folder again. Annoying but not a showstopper.
  #5  
Old February 5th 14, 02:31 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Flasherly[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,407
Default Help on max number of hard drives

On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 18:32:15 +0000, Jim
wrote:

I'm running a straight forward Win 7 U x64 machine allbeit with now 10
hard drives I have tried to initialize and partition a couple of new
drives but it just comes up with errors saying i need to convert to gpt
or gpd (sorry can't remember what one) i rebooted with a bootcd for an
app called mini tool partition wizard home v6.0 and it will format to
ntfs but its size is only 2048gb and 746 is unallocated, if i convert to
this format called GPT it makes a hidden partition of 128mb and a data
partition of 2794GB.

My question is why can't i just format like i used to with drives C, D,
E, F etc? Is this GPT safe to use in windows and apps like Acrinics true
image or do i need to buy another bit of software to format these new
drives.


Question is with over 2T there are other considerations, past segment
limitation of hard/firmware drives of yesteryear;- different ways to
address it, easiest being a recent revision MB's BIOS/SATA equipped
for natively passing thru -- say to W7, as you mention for the drive's
native capacity -- information as needed to interpret what precisely
needs addressing (when formatting out large drives in W7 and ignoring
stopgap software solutions for earlier OS limitations, such as
Win-XP). Formatting them out, as you continue to include a max number
of the post header should be: 4 primary partitions permitted for
switching actively to said partitions numbering for four actively
engaged or primary-linked Operating Systems, with a logical number of
partitions permitted, numbering to the 27 letters to the alphabet. I'm
advancing the number 27 upon W7 as the same number of drives that OS
Win-XP will allow, needless to mention I doubt I've ever exceeded,
variously, a dozen drives from personal experience.

And do, yes, experiment with a minor note of caution on different
software solutions for formatting. The results may at times differ
for favoring interesting solutions to who's who among such utilities.
  #6  
Old February 5th 14, 06:44 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Mark Lloyd[_5_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6
Default Help on max number of hard drives

On 02/04/2014 04:14 PM, Paul wrote:

[snip]

GPT is for drives over 2TB in capacity. It allows
you to take a 3TB or 4TB drive, and use the entire
thing for one partition.


I have a 320GB drive in this computer, using GPT. The OS formatted it
that way without asking. GPT has some advantages, even for smaller
drives although I don't understand that.

Go back and look at C, D, E, F. Are any of them
bigger than 2TB ? Or were those drives smaller ?
If they're smaller, then legacy MBR is sufficient
and that's what we've been using on the older OSes.


BTW, "over 2TB" (requiring GPT) applies to the physical drive. MBR won't
allow you to use more than 2TB, regardless of partition size (this is
because of MBR using 32-bit fields for sector number). ( 2 ^ 32 ) * 512B
= 2TB.

I expect if you install enough hard drives, eventually
you could run out of letters for the partitions.
I presume someone has a clever solution for that.
You see, there have been people who do "stupid
pet tricks" with hard drives, like install every
OS in existence on the drive, use a whole bunch
of logical partitions,


Those (for non-Windows OSes) drives could be using a format (ext4?)
unrecognizable to Windows.

and people like that would
likely use up all the drive letters (A to Z). I
don't know what comes after Z :-)


An older DOS (v2?) would allow up to 63 drives, although the "letters"
above Z were strange (probably ASCII). I think Windows won't let you
access any disks beyond Z.

Paul



--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us

"Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human
soul." [Mark Twain]

  #7  
Old February 6th 14, 03:11 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Paul
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13,364
Default Help on max number of hard drives

Mark Lloyd wrote:


BTW, "over 2TB" (requiring GPT) applies to the physical drive. MBR won't
allow you to use more than 2TB, regardless of partition size (this is
because of MBR using 32-bit fields for sector number). ( 2 ^ 32 ) * 512B
= 2TB.


Actually, there is a way to do that. And the software is part of
the free version of Acronis TIH on the Seagate and WD sites.

The idea is, when a drive is over 2TB, a filter driver is installed
by Acronis, which takes sector offsets above 2TB and makes them
into a virtual drive. The second virtual drive then shows up in
Windows. So perhaps in Disk Management, I'd see "Disk 3 2048GB" and
"Disk 5 748GB". If you examine the physical disk, there is a
second MBR at roughly 2TB plus 256KB or so. So it's like two
MBR-limited disks, living on the same storage device.

The Acronis "Extended Capacity Manager" is the thing that installs
the driver and makes it work.

Once you've done that, you can boot Linux, and do a loopback mount
of the area above 2TB. You have to work out the offset precisely,
and the Linux mounter accepts an offset above 2TB (64 bit offset).
The only problem, when I tested that, is it's dreadfully slow.
The NTFS partition mounted that way, could only copy files at
10MB/sec.

The Acronis TIH solution does work, but it's a bear to get it
running. Most of the time, the option to use Extended Capacity
Manager will be grayed out and it won't work. I had to do a
lot of fiddling with it, until it worked. At least Acronis
have now figured out how to remove that filter driver,
as in previous versions of TIH, they could install but not
remove the filter driver. The claim was, at the time, if
you attempted to remove it manually, it would blue screen the
computer. But now, you can even get the filter driver as
a separate package. I installed just the filter driver
in Windows 8.1 Preview, and my 3TB drive could be "seen as
two drives" in Windows 8.1. So I was able to test that
the scheme could work in a couple OSes. But it's not
an experience I'd look forward to again, trying to get
it to work on a new disk drive.

*******

That doesn't change the fact, as you point out, that the MBR
is limited to 32 bit sector addresses. That limit is still
present, but the filter driver idea at least allows the
capacity to be used, by preparing a virtual drive to use
the rest of the capacity.

One RAID controller (Areca) solves this problem, by abusing
the notion of sector size. If your array size is larger than
2TB, you can tick an option to pretend sectors are 4KB in
size, and then a larger array can continue to use MBR
instead of GPT. (i.e. 32 bit sector address times 4KB,
to give addressing up to 16TB or so.)

*******

As for an OS defaulting to GPT, that might have something
to do with UEFI support in the BIOS or something. My experience
here, loading a modern OS on a legacy BIOS motherboard, is it
defaults to MBR. It could be, that GPT is preferred, if
the Disk Management recognizes that GPT can be made to
work for booting the OS.

Paul
  #8  
Old February 6th 14, 09:57 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Flasherly[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,407
Default Help on max number of hard drives

On Wed, 05 Feb 2014 21:11:05 -0500, Paul wrote:

Not especially a passable portrait of ugly-as-baboon arses in heat in
the case of $1000US Areca SATA controllers (as listed on and if within
NewEgg's generic policy for farming out products on a basis of [their
reputability and exposure] 3rd-party jobber and middleman end
suppliers, i.e., the middling art of the selfsame for potential
profits from exclusionary politics.) Amazon has an interesting policy
for someone stealing money by not delivering an ordered product:
Simply, they don't. In my case, ultimately disallowing customer
service, as it's farmed out to an agency not integral to Amazon's
corporate structure (while neither being accessible, per se, for
purposes of arbitrator to the general public). Not that Amazon in any
way impeded a satisfactory and prompt solution;- in fact, as I may
have mentioned, I thought they were every bit as proficient, as an
extended widow further permitted by my most excellent credit card
institution.

Pragmatically aside, though, sounds like you may already have
suggested a strong case for sticking within a newer revised MB's SATA
specs on above 2T or 3+T-class drives. (10MByte/Sec sounds adequately
chilling indeed to send shivers down a spine.)


Actually, there is a way to do that. And the software is part of
the free version of Acronis TIH on the Seagate and WD sites.

The idea is, when a drive is over 2TB, a filter driver is installed
by Acronis, which takes sector offsets above 2TB and makes them
into a virtual drive. The second virtual drive then shows up in
Windows. So perhaps in Disk Management, I'd see "Disk 3 2048GB" and
"Disk 5 748GB". If you examine the physical disk, there is a
second MBR at roughly 2TB plus 256KB or so. So it's like two
MBR-limited disks, living on the same storage device.

The Acronis "Extended Capacity Manager" is the thing that installs
the driver and makes it work.

Once you've done that, you can boot Linux, and do a loopback mount
of the area above 2TB. You have to work out the offset precisely,
and the Linux mounter accepts an offset above 2TB (64 bit offset).
The only problem, when I tested that, is it's dreadfully slow.
The NTFS partition mounted that way, could only copy files at
10MB/sec.

The Acronis TIH solution does work, but it's a bear to get it
running. Most of the time, the option to use Extended Capacity
Manager will be grayed out and it won't work. I had to do a
lot of fiddling with it, until it worked. At least Acronis
have now figured out how to remove that filter driver,
as in previous versions of TIH, they could install but not
remove the filter driver. The claim was, at the time, if
you attempted to remove it manually, it would blue screen the
computer. But now, you can even get the filter driver as
a separate package. I installed just the filter driver
in Windows 8.1 Preview, and my 3TB drive could be "seen as
two drives" in Windows 8.1. So I was able to test that
the scheme could work in a couple OSes. But it's not
an experience I'd look forward to again, trying to get
it to work on a new disk drive.

*******

That doesn't change the fact, as you point out, that the MBR
is limited to 32 bit sector addresses. That limit is still
present, but the filter driver idea at least allows the
capacity to be used, by preparing a virtual drive to use
the rest of the capacity.

One RAID controller (Areca) solves this problem, by abusing
the notion of sector size. If your array size is larger than
2TB, you can tick an option to pretend sectors are 4KB in
size, and then a larger array can continue to use MBR
instead of GPT. (i.e. 32 bit sector address times 4KB,
to give addressing up to 16TB or so.)

*******

As for an OS defaulting to GPT, that might have something
to do with UEFI support in the BIOS or something. My experience
here, loading a modern OS on a legacy BIOS motherboard, is it
defaults to MBR. It could be, that GPT is preferred, if
the Disk Management recognizes that GPT can be made to
work for booting the OS.

Paul

  #9  
Old February 6th 14, 02:42 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Yousuf Khan[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,296
Default Help on max number of hard drives

On 04/02/2014 5:14 PM, Paul wrote:
I expect if you install enough hard drives, eventually
you could run out of letters for the partitions.
I presume someone has a clever solution for that.
You see, there have been people who do "stupid
pet tricks" with hard drives, like install every
OS in existence on the drive, use a whole bunch
of logical partitions, and people like that would
likely use up all the drive letters (A to Z). I
don't know what comes after Z :-)


Of course, it's been around for a long time already. Windows allows you
to mount hard drives as subfolders under other drives, just like with
Unix/Linux. This works okay, but there are a few problems. Windows own
utilities, like Resource Monitor, don't support drives without drive
letters. You will not see ResMon monitoring these drives.

Windows is still sort of set in the mindset of drive letters, even after
all of these years.

Yousuf Khan
 




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