3Tb My Book Essnetial & Win 7 Home premium - not able to create a backup Error 0x8078002a

I have a Toshiba E205 and am using usb2.0. I am unable to backup my pc to this HD using Microsoft utilities. However, the WD utility appears to function properly.

Has anyone found a solution to the Error 0x8078002a? I’ve seen lots of posts, such as on  this post  And I see Microsoft appears to maybe have a fix…but nothing that is released out to the public yet.

After checking my pc - it appears my pc has 512 bytes per sector, while the 3tb drive is at 4096. Which is probably the cause…

Is there any way to set the 3tb drive to a 512 bytes setting? aka, would a reformat do it?

Hi there, there have been reports in here that formatting a 3TB drive to make them have 512b sectors has ended in the drive not working afterwards, so if I were you I would not try it…

Still, W7 benefits from using 4K drives, but since you already have it running as 512b, then you would need to reinstall Windows 7 to get the performance 4K should give you.

I had this same issue with the 3 TB drive using Win 7 Home Premium.  I  tried reformatting with Win 7 but ended up with the same 0x8078002a error.  

The way I solved the problem was to download the latest firmware zip, which contains two executables.  I updated the firmware, repowered the drive and then rebooted PC.  Then I used the second program to reformat the drive using the factory default radio button.  After those two steps, it worked with Win7 image and backup.