[asyikarea51]

Scenario:

My 8+ year old PC is sitting unused for several months too long. Unfortunately for me to do a good refresh (and let it run on its last legs  ), there's a lot of data that I need to back up.

Question - considering the following:

1) the board's age (nvidia chipset, 775 socket, it predates SATA 3/USB 3.0)
2) and Windows XP being the OS of this computer, and this system drive itself has data to be backed up (everything constantly hangs, so my brain is mentally screaming all the warnings at me)
3) and the amount of data

I really want to go for the 4TB and 6TB drives to cut down on drive bays and having to shutdown and swap disks around manually, but will I face problems if I go for drives above 2TB since the system is so old? E.g. things like UEFI bios, GPT partition stuff? For example's sake, I can accept a single 6TB formatted as three 2TB partitions so long as the drive actually works and all the space comes out correct; my worry is if I went out and bought one (or more) of these big drives, only to discover something @ hardware level that is making these new drives not work at all.

[MP-Ryan]

What size disks do you currently have in it? Socket 775 motherboards will support large disks via SATA2. The limitation isn't hardware as far as I know.

Your OS (is it 64 or 32 bit?) is like to give you the most difficulty.  With Windows 7 there wouldn't be an issue, but XP uses the old disk partitioning system.  XP will do up to 2 TB fine, but anything beyond that may cause problems.

If you truly need upwards of 4 TB of data storage and prefer a single partition, I'd consider smaller disks (1 TB drives are cheap) in RAID 1 or 5.  The last thing you want is 4+ TB of data loss when a single disk goes down.  But again, XP probably won't let you do that.

[Gee1337]

It would be good to know the full spec of the PC.

You can forget Windows 7 if you have anything less than 4GB of ram by the time all the updates have been installed, as the PC will be VERY slow!

Could do with knowing what the connection types are on that current HDD as well. If backing up and you have a newer machine, I would recommend dropping that old HDD into the new machine so you can back it up.

Another option could be to invest in an adapter kit, like IDE to USB or something similar so you can back up the important info, then format the drive and reinstall Windows XP.

[asyikarea51]

Quick specs (looking back, it's total rubbish, really):
Q6600 B3 stepping on this board (a failure wrt quadcore OCing)
2x2 gb ram (because my 2x1gb sticks died. Board can take 8gb max)
ATI 5970 (welcome to driver hell)

IIRC drives are 3x 2TB and 2x 500GB (me not remembering the exact count just shows how long I haven't used it). All HDDs are SATA. (speaking of IDE, I still have two unused 80gb drives... just need a cable and bays to fit in the 5.25" area like the disc drive...)

The OS is XP 32-bit, which is the problem. I had the choice to go up to 64-bit years ago, but I think drivers or some other compatibility issue put me off. The other thing is that (granted this is my own fault) the data is literally all over the place, and I'm not familiar enough with RAID to use it comfortably; plus if I need a reformat to use that, all the more I won't be able to use it. As for going single partition, it may be my preference, but I am okay with using multiple partitions on a single 4TB+ drive, so long as that single drive, when bought and installed, actually works properly on this old system. My casing has no more HDD bays left.

I'm actually wanting to "put all the eggs in one basket" as a temporary measure simply because the files are all over the place. Waaay too many files to manually rearrange before I can even think of the next step of sorting the data by drives...

[Gee1337]

Drop an old IDE drive in an load Windows XP onto it. It will be the easiest way, as you should be able to read the data on the other drive no problems.

Note that Windows XP will not recognise more than 3.5GB of RAM.

As you have 4GB, put Win 7 on!

If you have a newer PC, then invest in an external SATA dock. Something like this perhaps.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-external/harddriveenclosures/Novatech/6619US3.html?gclid=CKC369e3wsYCFWzMtAodZvwFHw#utm_source=google&utm_medium=base&utm_campaign=products

[asyikarea51]

If anything I just need 5.25 enclosures and an IDE cable if I really really wanted to get my old pair of 80gb's to work again. I do want to put W7 and max out the RAM, but only after I've really sorted out all the data.

Still seeking a straight answer to my original question, will 4TB+ drives work on this old thing? And if these big drives do work, since XP32 can't do single partitions above 2+TB, can I do multiple partitions on a single 4TB+ drive without XP32 going nuts? Or are there other factors I need to watch out for?

Anyone? 

[Gee1337]

Straight(ish) answer and IIRC... no!

I believe you would have a problem when trying to drop the OS on the drive as it just won't recognise the partition type. It is possible but very fiddly and not worth doing. You might want to have a look here:-

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2172125/windows-unable-read-4tb-nas-harddisk.html

[asyikarea51]

I don't need to put any OS on the new drive; the main purpose for any new drives to be bought is really:

1) plug in
2) quick filesystem format
3) copy various data out from old drive to new drive
4) wipe and repurpose old drive (provided the blocks are still okay, that is).

The larger drives would really save me some hassle of needing to shutdown again and again whenever I need to physically swap drives (after every big chunk of data transfer) due to the lack of drive bays in the case. Had a quick glance on that forum thread, maybe I would need those third-party drivers, even though I do agree it'll be some oddball hack that might be troublesome to work with...

[Gee1337]

That is why I suggested you get a SATA dock, so you wouldn't have to keep turning the PC on and off. I've got one (though I lent it to my bro). You just turn the dock off, swap the drive and turn the dock back on. It connects via USB, so it essentially turns it into a flash drive for the fraction of a price of getting a new HDD.

Do you know roughly how much data you have and whether it would fit on one or both of the 2TB drives? If so, the dock is definitely the answer rather than fiddling with additional partition drivers etc...

The dock would probably be a useful tool for you to have anyway if you do decide to get a new drive and dump Win 7 on, as you would have reasonably easily accessible spare drives when needed.

Fair enough if you don't need/want to reinstall Windows XP, but I thought it would be a good idea to get it on one of those smaller IDE drives once you have the ribbon cable, then the larger drives can be come data dumps and you wouldn't have to worry about the info being lost if you needed to do another reinstall of the OS.

[asyikarea51]

Pffft must've been seriously sleepy at 2am last post, or I wasn't paying attention

All those drives are effectively full, so yes, a LOT of data to move around. It's another reason why I'd hoped drives above 2TB could be made to work somehow; shift all the data into a single 4/6TB "basket", wipe and check health of the 2TB's and... see what happens from there. (Ryan is right on the RAID arrays, maybe it's time I used it.)

I guess I never thought of the dock for some reason, my mind must've been focused way too much on how many backup HDDs I could get for my $ in hand, , maybe that's why I kept thinking of manual-swapping the drives all over. Unless I gamble with the mass file transfers on some Linux live CD and see how that works with drives above 2TB... that work? (Although I don't like doing a mass cut-paste this way; who knows what the file system driver would do. Been in weird cases where a file looks copied in some Linux, but didn't appear in Windows at all.)

[Gee1337]

Haha... and I bet you have a tonne of shyte on there that you don't need or want!

After reading your last post, I would get both the new SATA drive and the dock and do this:-

1) Get IDE cable
2) Install old 80GB HDD and dump Win 7 on it
3) Buy SATA dock and SATA drive
4) Put drive in new dock
5) Back up old drives

Whatever you do, good luck!

[Flaser]

OK, some good advice and some misaimed advice was given so far. Here is how the whole "old OS + new drive" thing breaks down:

1) Above 2 TB the drive needs to be formatted with a GPT instead an MBR partition table to see the whole disk (without special software*) regardless the OS.
2) Windows XP (32-bit) doesn't support GPT... et all (without special software*).
3) Windows Vista and later MS OS-es support GPT properly.
4) To *boot* from a drive formatted with a GPT partition table, your system needs to be UEFI compatible.
5) Accessing a drive formatted with GPT can be done on a system using BIOS, provided the proper OS (or special software*) is used.

*I've used such software with my first 4K sector size, 2TB+ drive. IIRC it was a WD drive with vendor supplied software to access the 2TB+ part of the drive on Windows XP. My experiences can be summed up as "just don't bother".

My advice is to focus on backing up your data first, *then* try and figure out how you want to reconfigure your system. For that purpose using one of the myriad "live disc/live USB" options should suffice. This could even be Windows PE on a disc made using a Windows 7 install disc, or use any Windows 7/8, etc. install disc (which are running in their own Windows PE environment), press F10 and you should get a command prompt and access to all the drives currently connected to the system.

Once your data is backed up you can try and clone the system, do a clean reinstall, dual-boot, whatever, but things will be a lot *less* hair-raising when you know you can undo things with your backup.

EDIT:

If you're worried about NTFS files with special permissions or want to preserve the ACL (Access Control List) of the files, or better yet, *the whole boot partition*, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the tool MS made for the task, ImageX.

It's a file-based back-up tool, so unlike sector-based tools like Norton Ghost you won't run into weird problems because the hardware (or its sector size or offset) is different. Sysops use it as part of mass-deploying various tweaked version of the OS, so it *should* handle most vagaries of how MS filesystems are tweaked. (Mostly uncrawlable symbolic links for win32 compability and other hacks). It can only back-up partitions, not whole disks, but you *can* tweak what it saves from said partition. (I think you'll mostly want the old user profiles just in case).

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722145%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

Another useful tool from MS is called robocopy, a mass file-copier. If all you want is to back up data, it's superb. Unfortunately it can't handle the above mentioned special symbolic links well. (Though IIRC, those only came into vouge with Windows Vista).