2024-12-23

discwizard

How to break the 2.1TB Barrier With Barracuda XT Hard Drives

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM07 mins

How to break the 2.1TB Barrier With Barracuda XT Hard DrivesUntil recently, using a hard drive larger than about 2.1TB has been difficult from a technical perspective. Back in the early 1980s when many of the fundamental hardware and software designs for computers were created, no one could fathom a hard drive approaching even 1TB, so limiting the logical block address (LBA) range to 2.1TB was thought to be more than adequate. As a result, operating systems, BIOS controllers, host interface drivers and device drivers have used the same basic limitation of 2.1TB.

Newer versions of Windows (Windows Vista and Windows 7), when combined with a new BIOS called UEFI and when configured correctly, have the native capability of using hard drives larger than 2.1TB. The problem, however, is that UEFI BIOS systems are less prevalent and more expensive than legacy PC BIOS systems. Also, Windows XP systems still represent a sizable portion of the installed base. So what do you do if you want to use one of the new
high-capacity hard drives coming to market that exceeds this 2.1TB limit?

Solution to break the 2.1TB Barrier With Barracuda XT Hard Drives:

Seagate has broken the 2.1TB barrier by developing a creative solution which allows you to utilize all of your hard drive capacity over two or more partitions when the drive is larger than 2.1TB. The new Seagate® Barracuda® XT 3TB hard drive has been released(See another post: https://www.datarecoveryunion.com/seagate-barracuda-xt-3tb-desktop-hard-drive/), and it includes free access to our updated Seagate DiscWizard™ software. This newest version of the popular hard drive utility from Seagate now includes functionality that allows you to easily configure a virtual device driver to access all of your hard drive capacity.1 It’s simple, fast and free.

Step 1. Locate the Software.
If you purchase a Seagate® retail kit, DiscWizard™ software will be included on the CD that is packaged inside. Otherwise, you are welcome to download DiscWizard software from the Seagate website. You can find it easily starting here: www.seagate.com/beyond-2TB

Step 2. Prepare Your System.
Time to open up the system, mount the drive and attach the SATA cable. It’s really quite simple to do. Tens of thousands of people add new hard drives every day! If you need a few pointers, please review some of the internal drive installation tutorials and flash presentations available online at www.seagate.com/support. Remember to handle your new drive with care.

Step 3. Install DiscWizard™ Software.
Restart your Windows system. After it finishes its normal preliminary startup routine, install the DiscWizard software application. You’ll see a new icon on your Desktop that looks like this:

DiscWizard

Step 4. Think About Your Plan, Start DiscWizard Software and Follow the Prompts.
Not everyone plans to use a drive the same way. You may be adding the new drive as secondary storage, or you may be migrating your old drive (Windows, applications, data, etc.) to your new drive. You may want to split the drive into drive letters. And on and on. DiscWizard software is a very versatile disk management utility—with easy-to-follow menu choices and questions; it will handle anything your system and OS will allow.

Step 5. A Few Words About Drives >2.1TB
As mentioned earlier, there are several capacity limitations that appear at 2.2TB. Any systems built before 2011 and using a drive greater than 2.1TB will need a device driver to access the terabytes above 2.1TB. DiscWizard software will automatically detect and offer to install the appropriate driver for your Windows OS and hardware (Windows 7, Visa or XP, 64- or 32-bit). The driver will mount the remainder capacity above 2.1TB as a new drive letter, usually D:. This new drive is also limited to a maximum of 2.1TB, so this will be repeated as necessary. A future 6.6TB drive will have three drive letters—C: managed by native Windows drivers; D: and E: drives managed by the DiscWizard driver.

The DiscWizard™ Extended Capacity Manager is intuitive and simple to use:

DiscWizard™ Extended Capacity Manager

Step 6. Enjoy Your New Seagate Drive and Keep DiscWizard Software Installed
DiscWizard software provides continuing value during the life of your drive. In addition, you can use the software to make image backups of your computer that may be useful if problems arise with your system or data.

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Seagate Today Began Shipments of Barracuda XT 3TB Desktop Hard Drive

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM04 mins

Barracuda XTBarracuda® XT Combines Highest Desktop Storage Capacity Ever Available with High-End Performance

Seagate today began shipments of the industry’s most elegant, easy-to-install 3TB desktop drive(Barracuda® XT hard drive) – a product that eliminates the need to purchase extra hardware or software to overcome the 2TB barrier. The Barracuda XT hard drive delivers the highest available capacity for home servers and workstations, high-definition video editing and production systems, high-performance PC gaming systems and desktop PCs.

Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB hard drive for desktop PCs

Legacy PC BIOS designs and device drivers and older operating systems such as Windows XP are incapable of using hard drive capacities beyond 2.1TB. The upshot is that existing desktop drives with more than 2.1TB of storage capacity must be deployed with additional software or hardware and may also require extra device drivers to overcome this limitation.

The Barracuda XT hard drive with free Seagate DiscWizard™ software is a complete, easy-to-deploy solution. DiscWizard software makes it simple to configure the computer operating system and device drivers to access the full 3TB of capacity on legacy systems using Windows XP and PC BIOS and on personal computers equipped with newer versions of Windows or the new UEFI BIOS.

“Seagate is squarely focused on delivering the storage performance, capacity and innovation to ensure that technology transitions remain seamless for our customers, the Barracuda® XT hard drive epitomizes our commitment to providing end-user customers and PC manufacturers with the world’s most advanced storage solutions.” – said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing and customer service.

The Barracuda XT hard drive combines a 64MB cache that optimizes burst performance in cache-intensive applications such as PC gaming and nonlinear video editing with Serial ATA 6Gb/s – an interface that delivers the highest system throughput – to enable the highest performance available in a desktop hard drive. The 3.5-inch, 7200RPM drive’s 3TB of storage capacity gives desktop PC users the most space ever available for videos, games, photos and files.

The Barracuda XT 3TB hard drive launch comes only months after Seagate introduced the Barracuda® Green hard drive, another Seagate desktop drive that streamlines technology transitions to simplify drive installations for PC makers and consumers. The eco-friendly Barracuda Green hard drive features Seagate’s SmartAlign™ technology to enable all the benefits of the new 4K sector standard while simplifying drive installation. SmartAlign technology works by eliminating the need for utilities often required to ensure optimum drive performance.

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What do I do if my hard drive reports bad sectors?

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM02 mins

Fix Bad Sectors Bad sectors can often be corrected by using a spare sector built into the hard drive. However, any information written to a bad sector is usually lost.

There are several methods for finding and correcting bad sectors.

1. Use the Error Checking utility built in to Microsoft Windows.

  1. Double Click My Computer, and right-click the hard disk.
  2. On the shortcut menu, click Properties, and on the Tools tab in the Properties dialog box, click Check Now in the Error-Checking Status area.
  3. In the Check Disk dialog box, select the Automatically Fix File System Errors check box, select the Scan For And Attempt Recovery Of Bad Sectors check box, and then click Start.
    View Windows help on detecting and repairing disk errors for more information.

2. Use SeaTools diagnostics for Seagate and Maxtor drives and run a long test.  For Seagate SCSI drives, use Seatools Enterprise. For Maxtor SCSI drives, test with SCSIMax.

3. Erase the drive:

  1. For SCSI drives: Use Seatools Enterprise (for Seagate drives) or SCSIMax (for Maxtor-brand drives) to perform a low-level format on the drive.
  2. For external drives: Use DiscWizard or your external drive management software to zero-fill your external drive.
  3. For internal ATA/IDE and SATA drives:Use SeaTools for DOS to perform a full zero fill.
    This option will erase ALL data on the partitions on the drive.
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Can I use DiscWizard to setup my Seagate external hard drive?

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM02 mins

DiscWizard DiscWizard can be used not only to format ATA and SATA drives, but external Seagate drives connected to the computer through USB, Firewire, or eSATA as well.  Though the setup procedure is almost the same as that used with internal drives, you want to be aware of a few of things:

  1. Unlike previous versions of DiscWizard, in addition to being able to use DiscWizard for Windows to set up an external hard drive, you can now also use the bootable version of DiscWizard for the same purpose.
  2. The external drive(s) can be identified by its interface type, which is listed in the “Interface” column of the Add New Disc Wizard.
  3. DiscWizard can only be used in Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.  For Windows 98 and Me, you will need to use FDISK and FORMAT instead.
  4. Because their connections have slower sustained transfer rates than internal ATA and SATA connections, partitioning and formatting USB and Firewire hard drives may take longer than usual.
  5. All other step are the same that you would see when preparing an internal hard drive.
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Internal Error 2

DATARECOVERYUNION.COM03 mins

Maxtor Manager program is showing Internal Error 2 and a red “M” icon indicating backup failure when to backup OneTouch III drive.  What is wrong?

This error generally appears in the OneTouch III Maxtor Backup log in the different Windows operating systems.  The “M” icon in the System Tray turns red, and it says that the backup has failed.

It is always referring to a file that is open or in use.  Most of the time, that refers to the Program Files of the Windows operating system, which is a folder located in the C: drive.
Most people choose to use Maxtor Backup to attempt to backup the entire contents of the C: drive, which is the boot drive of your Windows computer.  The Maxtor Backup, however, is not made to backup the Program Files and certain other files and folders successfully.

Thus, when you choose the Program Files as a folder to be backed up, you will sometimes see this message because of your anti-virus programs and the like.

Solution:

  • Close all files that are giving you this error and/or that are open during the backup, then try the backup again, and
  • Close down all anti-virus software during the running of the backup, or
  • Simply choose to backup only your data files, not the entire C: drive. Remember that Maxtor Backup is only meant to be a data backup, meaning your documents, photos, videos, music, etc.  It is not meant to backup the entire operating system or to make a mirror image of your drive, or
  • To make a full clone or image of your hard drive, see about using discwizard.
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