Wd my book 3tb disappearing from windows

Wd my book 3tb disappearing from windows how to#
Wd my book 3tb disappearing from windows mac os x#

Your BIOS does not support booting to GPT drives. I just mentioned that your PCвЂ™s BIOS looks at LBA 0 for the MBR. In order to boot to a GPT partition, you need hardware support. YouвЂ™ll note that I said data and not boot drives. Below we have some screenshots of creating a GPT drive in Windows and OS X:

Wd my book 3tb disappearing from windows mac os x#

GPT drives are supported as data drives in all ењ†4 versions of Windows as well as Mac OS X and Linux. With 64-bit LBAs the largest 512-byte sector drive we can address is 9.4ZB (Zettabytes - 10^21 or 2^70 bytes depending on if youвЂ™re counting in base 10 or 2). In use on all Itanium and Intel based Macs (among other systems) is GPT (GUID Partition Table), and a feature of GPT is 64-bit LBA support. Either way, with a 3TB drive thereвЂ™s no way weвЂ™re getting a single 3TB partition using MBR. Hard drive manufacturers define 1TB as 1 trillion bytes. Each LBA on a hard drive corresponds to a 512-byte sector value (even on 4K advance format drives, they still appear as 512-byte sector drives to the OS), so the largest partition you can have in a MBR partitioned drive is 4294967296 * 512-bytes or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes. Now LBAs under MBR partitions are addressed using 32-bit values, the maximum of which is 2^32 or 4294967296.

Wd my book 3tb disappearing from windows how to#

LBA 0 contains the Master Boot Record (MBR) and your BIOS looks at the contents of LBA 0 to determine how to boot. Master Boot Record partitioning is by far the most common on PCs today. The number of LBAs you can address is a function of your hardware and the style of partition youвЂ™ve applied to your drive. You start at LBA 0 and you go all the way up to the last address in your device.

Storage is addressed linearly, regardless of how the hardware itself is accessed. Pretty much all HDDs (and SSDs) are addressed using a scheme called Logical Block Addressing (LBA). I addressed this in my 3TB Seagate review back in August, so much of this is a rehash from the review back then with some new information toward the end of the page.