WD 3TB drive won't create GPT partition table

[Kevin Fairchild]

DNS 321, Alt-F RC4, WD 3TB drive with no data...

Trying to format the drive or convert the partition table to GPT gives this error message:

If I put the drive in an enclosure and connect directly to my Windows 8 laptop, disk management shows *two* GPT drives, unformatted: one of 2 TB and another of 746 GB. Windows thinks they're GPT, not MBR.

Do I just have a faulty disk that needs to be replaced? Or is there something I'm missing here? Thanks for your help....

[Kevin Fairchild]

Update: I put the drive in the enclosure and connected it to my wife's Win 7 laptop via eSATA. Disk management only saw 746 GB; I converted to MBR and then back to GPT, and returned the drive to the DNS, and now it is recognized as GPT!

So I tried to manually create partitions, and got the same error as in this thread: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt-f/N0G-X1zp4jg/99yWyRY16MAJ

Following Joao's instructions later in that thread, I think I've been able to get the drive partitioned. Now to format it!

[João Cardoso]

When no partition table exists MBR is used by default, even if the disk is greater than 2TB. This is an Alt-F compatibility "bug", as greater then 2TB disks were not common five years ago and most motherboards didn't support GPT yet.

I believe that proceeding and creating a 2TB MBR partitioning (with some unused disk space) would succeed, and afterwards converting it to GPT would also succeed, but I'm not sure.

The Disk Wizard should not have such issues, as, in contrast to the Disk Partitioner, it does not tries to preserve the existing disk partition table.

For greater than 2TB disks some disk enclosures, depending on its maker/model, can lie and report two disks instead.

[Kevin Fairchild]

Thanks for the response. I was able to format the drive and have it show up in Windows thanks to the posts on this forum. Everything's working great, and I couldn't have done it without the resources here. I appreciate it!

KF