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I have a Western Digital Black 4 TB Hard Drive in my PC running Windows 8.1. To get past my PC's 2 TB limit I have used Acronis Extended Capacity Manager to gain access to hard drive space beyond the 2 TB limit. I have ran live versions of Ubuntu and I would like to dual boot, or triple boot my PC, Windows 8.1 & Ubuntu & other. When I run the live version of Ubuntu, or any other Linux distro, my extended disk space is not seen by Linux. How can I get Ubuntu to see my extended disk space?

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I'm not intimately familiar with the software, but based on the description on its Web site, it sounds like this is a non-standard Windows driver that makes a disk look like two or more physical disks to Windows. If I'm right, the only way to access such a disk in Linux would be to write an equivalent driver for Linux, and AFAIK no such driver exists.

That said, the question is why you used this software in the first place. You say you're running Windows 8.1. If the computer shipped with this software, it almost certainly booted in EFI mode and used the GUID Partition Table (GPT) for partitioning. GPT supports over-2TiB disks, so there'd be no reason to use any third-party stuff. Even if you installed Windows yourself in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, you could use GPT on a 4TiB data disk; only the boot disk is limited to using MBR in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode. If the computer is newer than about 2011, it probably supports EFI-mode booting. Thus, you might want to re-consider your system configuration at a fundamental level:

  • If your computer is BIOS-only (as are most pre-mid-2011 machines), you may be somewhat stuck -- but even then, using a sub-2TiB boot disk and your 4TB disk as a GPT data disk should work. Note that you can install Linux to a GPT disk even in BIOS mode; tying GPT to EFI is a Windows limitation, not a BIOS issue, and Linux does not share Windows' limitation on this score.
  • If your computer has an EFI, you can re-install Windows in EFI mode. This will use GPT, which supports your full disk capacity.

The problem with either approach, though, is that you'll need to back up your personal data and restore it after you're done re-installing.

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You can get and run the Seagate Extended Capacity manager directly from Seagate, and it does not require any Acronis Software. Also, remove the Intel Rapid store Drivers, I had to in order to make the Seagate product work. Since the Seagate product is ONLY for Windows, make sure all of the data you place into the new Extended Partition, is not of great importance. I would put ONLY windows software originals and other media photos videos etc stuff. Why? Well as you can see if you put valuable data in there, did a backup of the 3 or plus you corrupt the 3 TB or larger drive, you will have no direct means of recovering it in a disaster situation. So you could store non-valuable data, knowing that you would be forced to reinstall the extended capacity and then use Acronis or Macrium to restore the partitions folder back, in the event of Full recovery, because Acronis or Macrium rescue will backup the Seagate extended partition, but you will not be able to restore it using the bootable recovery media. You can restore it later on after formatting the second partition later on. Potentially however and not yet having had to, it may allow by doing partition recovery, from the Windows-created recovery media, by doing it from within windows. So you could recover the windows drive partition and then recover the extended capacity partition later by installing the extended capacity manager onto your system and windows folders and then restoring the folders back to the extended partition later from within windows itself and whatever backup software you used, even the one from the recovery DVD or Windows Install DVD. (Which I do not trust, and is horribly slow.) But is free.

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    Very good observation and 100% correct, but it does not answer the question: "How do I see it under Linux?"
    – Fabby
    Nov 24, 2017 at 12:57

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