3 TB: the complications of being large

UPDATE: After formatting the beast after finding a USB/SATA that worked, I kept getting a few corruption events, so I bought a better case. Both the new case and the drive died.

3 TB is a phenomenal amount of data, so surely having 3 TB would solve all one's problems.

No. It generates more. Many more.

I ordered gleefully a new 3 TB beast from e-bay and put into an external hard drive case in place of a 200 GB disc.

Size: 724 GB. Windows it turns out was written by monkeys in front of keyboards or steampunkish converted typewriters, consequently nothing really works and it is not possible to format (a necessary step to use) a partition with more than 746 GB.

However, GParted, a linux Live CD used to format discs, can format the whole lot. But as it turns out, the chip for the external drive encasing needs to be special, allowing it to support 2+ GB, otherwise the disc will show only 746 GB. So I had to mount it inside my PC.

Computer boffins simply say to format the partition as NTFS (the fenestral one †) with a GPT. Obviously, there is no clear option for that in GParted. After some fiddling I find it (I had to delete and create a custom one, instead of simply replacing it).

Excited, I switch over to windows only to discover that Windows Vista did not recognise the partition table and gave the hard drive as unformatted. Formatting it in windows only allows 746GB, namely square one.

It turns out that when the hard drive was formatted the program put a code that basically identified the formatting OS as Linux, which Bill Gates's brainless brainchild hates —thus I hate it in turn.

After a few failed tries, I solved the problem by formatting it to 746 GB in Windows and expanding it in Linux. Size in windows: 3 TB.

Ecstatically exited, I try filling the hard drive up, only to discover a glass wall at 746 GB, which grinds the computer to a halt.

I am a probably missing some technical word as I was unable to find in google what was causing the barrier at around 750 GB. For some time now, I have been meaning to upgrade to 64bit as my computer was bought from a shop, which installed the 32bit version on a 64bit architecture computer to be safe. This was the last straw: good-bye 32 bit Vista, hello 64 bit Windows 7. The problem has magically disappeared!

Now, the next herculean task is to fill it up...

† Fenestral means "pertaining to windows".