How-To Geek

I recently bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 7200rpm drive to replace a 2TB drive in an external enclosure.
I attached it via e-Sata to my laptop, an Acer Aspire 6935G (T9400 Core2Duo, PM45 Express chipset, latest Intel Storage Controller software) running W7 x64.
I initialised it as GPT and formatted it as a single NTFS volume. It showed in "My Computer" as 2.72GB formatted.
I copied some files over home network from another pc and all went fine.

The other pc is an HP N40L Microserver with an embedded AMD processor and chipset, running W7 x64.
I attached the external hard drive via e-Sata to the HP, so I could copy across all the other files I wanted to.
The HP couldn't recognise the drive.
I had to go into "Computer Management" and re-initialise the drive.
It didn't recognise the former volume and I had to re-format it.

I copied the files I wanted to across, then connected the external drive to the laptop once more.
I ran into the same problem - the laptop didn't recognise the drive and I had to re-initialise and re-format it in order to make use of it.

As one can imagine, this rather defeats the purpose of having an external drive.
I was wondering if any of the boffins here could help me out.
I have spent hours Googling, but had no success in finding a solution.

I should mention, the external enclosure is supposedly rated for max 1.5TB HDDs.
I bought it from eBuyer.com and many users reported that it worked fine with larger drives.
I had a 2TB drive in there and both PCs were able to intialise and format the 3TB drive, so I don't think the enclosure is at fault.

From your post and the links provided, I assume you think I am running into the 2,2GB MBR limit?

Hi, raphoenix

Thank you for replying.

I am a firm believer in redundant backup and have several strategies in place. This external drive is one way of doing so.
The issue is not with anything mentioned in the pcworld.com article - I familiarised myself with all requirements before purchasing a 3TB drive.
I am running W7 x64, I am not attempting to boot from the drive, I initialised it as GPT.

As I wrote, I can initialise it, format it and read/write to it just fine - but only from the PC I did so.
If I attach the external drive to another PC, it doesn't recognise it.
From all the research I did, including various sources on Microsoft's web pages, I should be able to connect it to any W7 x64 PC and have it recognised.

I am going to remove the drive from the enclosure and try it in a desktop PC I keep for testing purposes.
I'll see if I can move it from internal to external and get it to be recognised.