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I recently bought a 3TB hard drive (TOSHIBA DT01ACA300). At the time I was prone to using Windows XP because of some old legacy software, so I could only partition a 750 GB part. Now, with Windows 8, the same partition is recognized as RAW and therefore I can't access it.

How do I recover the partition? I'm already using about 500 GB of space so backuping is the least I would like to do (I still have XP on my machine in case of disaster). I already tried EaseUS Restorer but it didn't had the HDD in its database. Right now I'm running testdisk but astonishingly it only found a 2 tiny FAT16 partitions.

Doktoro Reichard
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Kimmel Gábor
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3 Answers3

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I could only partition a 750GB part.

Lets stop here because this is where your problem starts. The actual drive is probably not 3TiB but 'marketing 3TB'. That is about the same as 2TiB+750GiB.

Your old OS looked at the drive and had a wraparound. Think of that as having two boxes to write numbers in and then you count to 120. It would start like this:

1     (first number)
2     (second)
..
98    (98)
99    (98)
00    (100)
01    (101)
..
20    (120).

Rather than wrapping at 100 your OS wrapped at 2TiB. It has a wrong idea about the drive.

"Good enough" tought I, "I can partition the rest later with Windows 8". Turns out Win8 sees the partition as a RAW partition and cannot access it.

Windows 8 (or any OS not limited to MBR) will see the drive as it actual is. It has the right picture which sadly differs from what your XP installation thinks of the drive.

Question is, how do I recover the partition? I'm already using about 500GB of space so backuping is the least I would like to do.

Backupping and repartitioning is exactly what I would do.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you have a backup first. And test that backup.

Even if it is just in case you break anything while trying to find a different solution. But if you already have a working backup then the quickest way is wipe the disk (start, run, diskpart and then clean ON THE RIGHT DRIVE) and then to repartition it.

Hennes
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MBR (Master Boot Record), and the only partition table Windows XP can handle, does not support drives bigger than 2 TB, according to this Microsoft post.

GPT (GUID Partition Table) is needed to access drives larger than 2 TB and it is available on versions of Windows later than XP. I'm assuming that your drivers on the XP machine let you use some hack using MBR since you didn't use 2 TB or more of the drive. Since the drive is still that large, Windows 8 likely sees that data as above the 2 TB mark, so it can't see it using MBR.

As for getting the data into Windows 8, my advice is that you would be best off getting another drive, so that you can back up and repartition the original drive under Windows 8. You could even buy an external 1 TB drive, copy the data, wipe the drive, then sell it on eBay or something. But you're not going to be able to get the data from Windows 8.

For some more info, look at this link: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218619en The gist of it is that, if your BIOS does not support UEFI, you cannot use more than 2 TB of any drive. Even if using a version of Windows that supports GPT, you can possibly use the 3 TB as a data drive, but never as a boot drive. You may be able to partition it into multiple partitions of less than 2 TB, but it doesn't look intuitive or easy.

Joshua Nurczyk
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Windows 8 is probably looking at this as a GPT drive, not as the MBR type drive that windows XP created the partition. At this point, probably best to backup the files for your windows Xperia machine and re-init the drive under windows 8 as GPT.

jdh
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