I have a Win 7 system. and I wish to copy an external Seagate 1.5 TB backup drive to a new external 4.0 TB Seagate HD. Ghost 15 sees the 1.5 TB drive but doesn't see the 4TB drive. The drive isn't intended to be bootable. Any help appreciated.
jmohn3 wrote:I have a Win 7 system. and I wish to copy an external Seagate 1.5 TB backup drive to a new external 4.0 TB Seagate HD. Ghost 15 sees the 1.5 TB drive but doesn't see the 4TB drive. The drive isn't intended to be bootable. Any help appreciated.
Hi,
One of the limitations of Ghost 15 is that it does not recognize drives over 2T. The replacement program SSR [Symantec system recovery] does. I will assume that you are aware that Ghost is no longer a supported product.
Say well and surf safe
Does the external drive contain installed programs or is it just all data?
Are you planning on using the external drive as a destination for your system images?
If so, does Ghost "see" the drive as a destination for your images?
If you happy with ghost you may not need to purchase another product, you may be able to continue using it and just use a SSR recovery disk if you need to restore the system.
Dave
DaveH wrote "
Does the external drive contain installed programs or is it just all data?
Are you planning on using the external drive as a destination for your system images?
If so, does Ghost "see" the drive as a destination for your images?"
Thanks for your reply.
the 1.5 TB drive is all backup data and I plan to use the new 4TB drive to store backups as well as data, and photos. As mentioned it won't be configurated a a bootabe drive.The 4TB drive will have several partitions for ghost backup files and other data.
Windows explorer sees both the 1.5 & 4 TB external drives. Ghost sees the 1.5 TB but not the new 4TB drive.
Hi,
That's one of the shortcomings of Ghost 15. It does not see drives larger than 2TB.
Keep us posted
Hi dickevans. last evening I sent you a reply to your original reply but it doesn't appear to have made it to the board. Thank you for both of your replies. I'll try to recreate my original reply masterpiece. Pls excuse this current note if the original finally gets released from forum purgatory and pops up at a later time.
No, I was not aware that Ghost 15 is no longer supported. However, I've read a couple of posts from several years back which addressed a similar issue. It concerned using Ghost 15 to backup to an external Western Digital 3TB drive. At that time it was speculated that a future upate would provide support for larger drives (but it appears that upate evolved into an upgrade ie., Symantec System Recovery). But the post(s) also alluded to a work around for the 3TB which involved reformating the 3TB drive but leaving it unallocated (unpartitioned?). Do you have any knowledge of that work around? or was I dreaming?
Hi,
Yes, the work around is to use NTFS formatting and have partitions no larger than 2 TB. You can use all of the space, just don't make any partition too large.
Keep us posted
The limitation is in the type of partitions used for big drives.
Any drive over 2TB requires GPT partitions to use the whole drive.
More commonly, before the larger drives became availible most hard drives used MBR partitioning.
The problem is that you can only use MBR partitions up to a total drive size of 2TB because it is unable to address anything higher than that. The limit is 2^32 x 512bytes = 2TB
512 bytes is the size of the standard sector, 2 to the 32'nd power is the largest address 32bit windows can use.
(hence 32bit windows).
It doesn't matter if your using 64bit windows, that limitation was followed to provide backwards compatibility.
Drives larger than 2TB require GPT patitioning. Think of it as 64bit addressing 2^64 x 512 = a very big number, larger than NTFS supports.
If you have a large GPT partition over 2TB I don't think it can be accessed by any 32bit operating system and the Ghost 15 recovery disk is based on 32bit Vista. SSR 2013 has a 64bit recovery disk to support GPT partitions.
But since you are creating the images in windows I thought Ghost 15 may continue to work.
I have some people here say it does and some who say it does not. I personally never got a drive that large because I prefer MBR drives.
But maybe if you setup the drive with 2 GPT partitions and the first partition a little smaller than 2TB Ghost may be able to use the first partition as a image destination.
If that works you can download the SSR 2013 recovery disk and use that for restores. (a free way out)
If Ghost 15 does not work to make images onto the GPT drive than you have no choice then to purchase SSR 2013 or another product if you want to use that big drive to hold your images.
Dave
Dave H, again many thanks. I'll give it a try.
I recently bought a 3TB HDD. I am now using SSR 2013, but oddly the Ghost 15 SRD sees files and folders on the 3TB drive just fine. I even verified a Ghost image with no issues. So I wonder if the limitation has to do with chipset drivers or something.
redk9258 wrote:I recently bought a 3TB HDD. I am now using SSR 2013, but oddly the Ghost 15 SRD sees files and folders on the 3TB drive just fine. I even verified a Ghost image with no issues. So I wonder if the limitation has to do with chipset drivers or something.
Hi,
How is it formatted and partitioned?
Thanks
One 3TB GPT partition.
DISKPART> detail vol
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
* Disk 1 Online 2794 GB 0 B *
Read-only : No
Hidden : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy : No
Offline : No
BitLocker Encrypted : No
Installable : Yes
Volume Capacity : 2794 GB
Volume Free Space : 2046 GB
Thats why I said I have seen some people here say it works and some say it doesn't. I can't figure out why.
But from the SRD it really shouldn't work.
I would be willing to say that once the drive has more than 2TB of data on it you will start finding problems trying to use it with anything 32bits.
Hi dickevans ,
Per your request for followup. I reformated to NTFS and attempted to create a 2TB partition and a free space with the remaining drive capacity. I ended up with a healthy, active, NTFS primary 1773GB partition and two unallocated spaces, one 275GB and the other 1678GB. I've taken the issue to a hard drive forum (Tom's Hardware) to understand what needs to be done to combine the unallocated spaces into one contiguous block of either unallocated space or freespace.
Thanks again for your support.