need 3TB portable

[Sparky]

Can anyone recommend a portable eternal 2.5" 3TB USB 3.0 hard drive that will work with XP?
I have a Seagate Expansion+ 3TB where I have all my backups on. Unfortunately it fell out of my bag and doesnt work anymore. I sent it to Seagate to get recovered. Over 5 weeks later I receive a 4TB 2.5 drive. When I sent it in I asked what drive would I receive and they told me 3TB. Half my files are corrupted and I cant use them but that's another story. Long story short this drive wont work in XP therefore I need to find a 3TB that does.

 

[doublejack]

I think, unfortunately, such a drive is going to be hard if not impossible to find at this point. The way those larger than 2TB external drives supported XP was by falsely reporting the geometry of the drive. The drives were all SATA inside, so the USB-SATA bridge translated the interface. While doing that, they also reported that the drives used MBR partition tables (when they were actually GPT) and have 4k sectors, when the actual logical sector size is 512 bytes. Therefore, when the OS writes a 4KB LBA to the drive, the bridge breaks it up into 8 x 512e LBAs, and then writes them to the drive. The drive then takes those 8 LBAs and reassembles them into a single 4KB physical sector (assuming it is an advanced format drive).

The problem you're going to have is twofold. First, some of the drives are now native USB on the drive controller. Without a USB-SATA bridge there is no opportunity to fake the drive's geometry. The second issue is that even if there is a USB-SATA bridge, the incentive to fake the drive's geometry (and take the performance hit associated with this process) is very minimal. Drive makers aren't going to take XP compatibility into consideration anymore.

If you absolutely need the XP compatibility I suggest you stick to 2tb and smaller drives. That may be the best you can do.

 

[diizzy]

That said, XP is EoL and you should upgrade to something supported.
As doublejack said you've probably corrupted all files on it, you could try booting Ubuntu or another Linux distro (there are live images available) and try to read the files that way and/or copy the ones you need to a smaller medium.

 

[Sparky]

I ended up getting a 3.5" 4TB drive to replace the original that was in the enclosure. I was trying to avoid having the ac adapter but at least XP can see it.