hdsentinel wrote:The partitioning sounds interesting. It may be not required at all, but it is possible to improve compatibility with older systems which can't address disk drives over 2 TB.
But then interesting that you see the 2nd partition is also over 2 TB....
Just used HD Sentinel to test OUT (decide to trash) some large HDs.
Since I had Windows Disk Mgmt running on the side, as I had completed deleted the volume before running the surface test in HDS, I noticed the goofy partitioning show up on each drive for a while.
Every time, the initial full unused partition after start of the write test "magically" changed to two partitions. First one always 2TB, the second covering the rest of the disk.
Further on in the test, if I remember correctly, the goofy partitioning disappeared again and it returned to be a single empty partition in Diskmgmt.
BUT, I don't think the drive is actually getting partitioned. It is not a 2TB limitation thing.
I think it is merely Windows (mis-)interpretation of the data over-writing partition defining sectors. Diskmgmt will on occasion refresh it's disk info (at least on a signaled change), and then reads off bad data as GPT or MBR info.