Windows 7 backup not work with HD drives greater than 2Tb

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afe66

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#139365 6-Feb-2014 14:54

Parents rang up. Heard something on the radio about importance of backing up computer ( my suggestion about this was ignored in past but I'm not on the radio..).

Suggested Go to dick smith / Harvey Normans etc and buy a USB drive, plug in , control panel backup, backup create backup.

Phone back ... Not work I'm told, IO error.... Parents had bought another drive (!?) same problem... Contacted support sea gate, pages of suggestions, reference to knowledge article etc ....parents give up..

This week, visiting parents and instructed to fix the backup issue.

At the end of the day..... Microsoft W7 inbuilt backup Utility can't write to USB drive greater then 2Tb due to issues with sector size being too big....

Are you joking Microsoft ............really ....you can't fix this....?!?!?

So I took the 2tb and 3 tb USB drives home and couriered an old 1tb drive which works perfectly.

A.

Gilco2

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#981273 6-Feb-2014 15:28

surely you could have put 2 smaller partitions and let them keep the drives.

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nathan

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#981275 6-Feb-2014 15:29

Windows prior to Windows 8 doesn't support 4k logical sector sizes of those disks

Drive manufacturers chose an emulated format to make those disks compatible with older OSes like XP

Download the utility from your drive manufacturers website and reformat the drive

For WD for example download the WD Quick Formatter tool, select the Factory Default configuration to reformat the drive.

nathan

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#981278 6-Feb-2014 15:33

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848035(v=vs.85).aspx

afe66

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#981307 6-Feb-2014 16:10

I repartitioned the drives into smaller size using the supplied seagate utility ie two about 1.5 tb each and tried to backup into one of the smaller drives and it refused with the same error at the same point. Wondered whether the sector size was still the same.

There are solutions using acronis ( sea gate use a version of this ).

I was just surprised that Microsoft hadn't released an upgraded version of the windows 7 backup program which addressed this (predictable) issue as it can be addressed using third party software.

What would have taken 2 minutes to setup with a 1Tb drive has taken hours with a 2 Tb one and caused many hours of frustration to my parents - they gave up after spending $300 + on drives.

A.

Perhaps a note somewhere on back section under control panel saying, this will not work with drives bigger than 2 Tb would have saved my parents from spending as much.

afe66

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#981337 6-Feb-2014 16:35

nathan: Windows prior to Windows 8 doesn't support 4k logical sector sizes of those disks

Drive manufacturers chose an emulated format to make those disks compatible with older OSes like XP

Download the utility from your drive manufacturers website and reformat the drive

For WD for example download the WD Quick Formatter tool, select the Factory Default configuration to reformat the drive.

True. But little icon on side of drive box saying compatible with Windows 7 didn't help my parents understanding.

A.

richms

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#981453 6-Feb-2014 19:05

Its insane that they allow things to become an issue before starting to deploy fixes for them. Seen it before many times at 137 gig, and the one before it. What will be the next size where HDD capacity hits another artificial limit that should have been solved a long time ago.

same thing happened with the idiots that made SD cards made SDHC only work out to 32 gigs before breaking, so most of my devices have to use a 64 gig card in a non-standard format.

Richard rich.ms