I have two supposedly identical 3TB Western Digital USB hard disk drives. One contains nearly the full 3TB of data. I want the other to be a backup of that data. There are lots of small files, so running cp would be even slower than copying 3TB over USB using dd. Both drives were bought at the same time, both use MSDOS partition table, but one shows logical/physical sector sizes of 4096/4096 and the other shows 512/4096.
My problem is that I’m trying to copy to the 512/4096 drive, but I can’t create a large enough partition because of the limits of the MSDOS partition table with 512 byte (logical) sectors. I've tried various commands (dd of the first few sectors to partition table, parted, fdisk, gparted, Windows XP “Manage” and Windows 7 “Manage”) but end up with either 2TB max limits or ~300GB partitions that thought they were 3TB when they were created.
Given that one of my drives is running at 4096/4096 then this question doesn’t hold true for my case.
Using GPT is my fall-back option, but it creates a partition that is slightly smaller than the NTFS partition, so I wouldn't be able to just dd the filesystem on the partition.
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