ASUS Disk Unlocker - Beyond the 2TB Limit

[Tharic-Nar]

3TB drives have slowly been popping up these last few months in one form or another, such as Seagate's External GoFlex drive, Western Digitals internal Caviar Green with PCIe card and Hitachi's own internal 3TB drive. These drives are great and all, but there be a small caveat, most motherboard BIOS' and Operating Systems can not use them past the 2.2TB limit set by the Master Boot Record's 32-bit LBA table.

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

 

[DarkStarr]

Glad I went with an ASUS in case I decide to upgrade hahahah, well, not that I wouldn't split the partition since no one needs 3 TB on their main partition..... My main HDD is a 1 TB but split at 100 GB for windows only and a few other things then the other 900 is currently only for program files and what not so the drive doesn't have much used space yet but as I get more HD movies I may end up with stuff on it lol.

 

[Rob Williams]

Let me make sure I get this (I am still sick, so if I'm off base I am blaming that). With this solution, you have two drives listed in "My Computer", but both are essentially the same? I don't really see the point to be honest. It's a minor benefit over simply setting it up as a 2TB and 1TB. This might benefit those who need a single 3TB partition, so I guess that's a plus.

 

[Optix]

I have a super ultra mega high def pr0n movie that I absolutely cannot break up! 3TB? My prayers have been answered!

I'm with DarkStarr on this one. What average user needs a 3TB partion?

 

[Tharic-Nar]

It doesn't create a single 3TB partition, it takes the remaining unallocated space and creates a new virtual hard drive out of it. When you look at the the 3TB drive in Disk Manager, it will show the 2,2TB partition with 800GB unallocated space, but if you select the 800GB and try to format it, it will grey out the option. So you can not do anything with the remaining disk space unless you reformat to a larger cluster or use GPT, thus loose the ability to boot. If you try to split the hard drive into 3 partitions, it will still fail because you run out of allocation bits (limited to 2^32) and as far as i know, you can't set different cluster sizes across different partitions on the same drive.

This tool just allows you to use the entire drive whilst keeping it bootable, not as a single volume, but as a single drive.

The following thread shows you what happens when using the tool, check the name of the new Hard Drive that is created, ASDK, it's a SCSI device... so think of this like Daemon Tools with CD/DVD/BD emulation, it creates a SCSI device with the disk sectors remapped via software to those past the 2.2TB limit on the 3TB+ hard drive.

BTW - 2.2TB Decimal = 2048GB Binary, remember disk manufacturers like to confuse us... ... maybe i should use GiB and TiB in future...