I'm attempting to encrypt a new 3 Tb hard drive (Western Digital My Passport Ultra) using Symantec Encryption Desktop (formerly PGP Whole Disk Encryption) v. 10.3.0. I've used it to encrypt many other drives up to 2 Tb in size. This is the first time I'm working with a 3 Tb drive.
When I plug in the drive (USB 3) and open the Encryption Desktop and then click "Encrypt Disk" in the menu, the listing for the new drive does not show it as having 3 Tb. Instead the drive is listed as:
746.5 GB Removable Media
USB Bus: WD My Passport 259F USB Device
When I plug in a 2 Tb drive, it shows up in Encryption Desktop as:
1863.0 GB Removable Media
USB Bus: WD My Passport 0820 USB Device
I did some research and found a Symantec support page indicating that encryption does not work with partitions larger than 1.8 Tb and that drives larger than that can be encrypted by dividing them into smaller partitions. So I partitioned the drive into two partitions of 1.4 Tb each. (The actual size of the drive is 2.8 Tb.) After I did that, Windows Explorer shows the drive as two distinct drives of 1.4 Tb each. But Encryption Desktop still shows the drive with the same listing as before. It does not recognize the additional partition at all. I rebooted and it still comes up the same way.
I found another support page that suggests the problem could be a sector size of 4k instead of 512 bytes. I ran fsutil to check this and I'm not sure what to make of the results. Here are selected lines from fsutil on the 3 Tb drive:
C:\Windows\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo e:
...
Number Sectors : 0x00000000b2698fff
Total Clusters : 0x00000000164d31ff
...
Bytes Per Sector : 512
Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096
Bytes Per Cluster : 4096
...
And here are the corresponding lines for the 2 Tb drive (which is handled properly by Encryption Desktop):
C:\Windows\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo g:
...
Number Sectors : 0x00000000e8df7fff
Total Clusters : 0x000000001d1befff
...
Bytes Per Sector : 512
Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096
Bytes Per Cluster : 4096
...
So the bytes per sector appear to be the same for both drives, but there might be something I don't understand here because the "Number Sectors" is much larger for the 2 Tb drive than for the 3 Tb, when I presume that should be the other way around. Also, the Total Clusters is slightly larger for the 2 Tb than for the 3, which again should be the other way around.
While I'd like to understand what's going on with fsutil, the urgent question is why does Encryption Desktop not properly recognize the 3 Tb drive, and how do I get it to recognize it properly?