Seagate 3tb hard drive not recognized

varunaX wrote:

hey ted, can you help me understand your solution a bit better?  i am having the exact same prob with my 3tb usb drive.  i can see one 2048 gb partition and 746.52 of unallocated space that when right click i have no options.

 

i tried downloading the acronis trial and when i try to create a new volume for that allocated space i get an error. 

 

im not the most computer savvy, so any suggestions you could give me would be great.  thanks

Hi varunaX

Before we begin (!) - although you say that Acronis won’t create that volume, three questions:

a) Check through ‘My Computer’ - is the second volume listed as a hard drive with a letter?

b) Is your ‘working’ partition 1.37TB or is it circa 2TB?

c) What’s your OS? Mine’s Vista 32-bit home.

If state (a) from above is what you’ve got, then just use Windows Disk Management to format that volume. If it isn’t, then either you will need the full version of Acronis after all (I did buy the licence but wasn’t sure exactly what was achieved using the trial version beforehand - from your predicament I suspect not much) or your first volume is too large.

To start afresh, here’s what I did:

    • Delete the main volume you have using the Windows Disk Management controls
    • (Assuming you have a Seagate STAC 3000200 GoFlex) the built-in Seagate software will ask if you want to format the disk - select ‘yes’
    • Using the Windows Disk Management tool, right-click ‘shrink volume’. It should allow you to create two volumes of approx 1.37TB each. Accept this choice
    • Format the 1.37TB volume
    • Using Acronis, you should see two volumes now, each of 1.37TB. Try formatting the second volume at this point
    • Check ‘My Computer’ and see if you have two new volumes. If you don’t, then you will definitely have to buy the Acronis licence. Nb - there may be other partition tools available that might accomplish this for free. Partition Wizard is not one of them
    • Even at this stage, Acronis wouldn’t format the second volume for me. As it was recognised as a drive (unformatted) under Windows, I just formatted it as before.

Let me know if you’re still having problems after all of this. I’m going mainly off memory here but I’ll go through the process again for real if you are in a hole still at the end of trying to sort this out.

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