Question MBR with large drives

[RodneyDawn]

I know MBR partitions have to be 2Tb or less, but what about the drive itself. take a 4 TB WD black for example. Could I create 2 MBR partitions of 1.99TB each to make use of the whole drive. This would be on an older AM2+ motherboard that doesn't support UEFI but has no trouble formatting a 2TB HDD MBR. OS is WIndows 7 Home premium 64 bit.

The reason I ask is to clarify if this is just a size per partition limit and multiple 1.99TB partitions will work, or if its like the old 137gb LBA48 limit and anything over the 2TB point on the drive would corrupt data regardless of the partitions themselves being less than 2TB
The motherboard BIOS correctly identifies the 4TB WD Black HDD, so there is no hardware issue.

 

[USAFRet]

No, 2x 2TB partitions won't work on the physical drive.
The partition table holds info for the whole drive.

Just do it as GPT.

 

[RodneyDawn]

Ok Thanks for clearing that up.

 

[fzabkar]

Seagate's DiscWizard (an OEM version of Acronis True Image) was able to do this. The extra space beyond 2TiB became a "virtual HDD" that was visible after booting to Windows, but it required an Acronis/DiscWizard driver.