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I am attempting to passthru a brand new Seagate USB disk (4TB) to a Windows 2008 virtual guest in XEN 6.2. I connected the device, it is listed properly by fdisk -l (even lists correct size, but says Use GPT due to size). I used gdisk to create GPT partition table and partion 1 as EFI GPT type (700). The disk is then listed in XenCenter under Removable Storage, and displays the correct size there.

Then I used XenCenter to "attach" the disk to my virutual guest Windows 2008 x64 server. The disk immediately appears in Computer Management: Storage as an uninitialized disk, but the size is reported as 29,808GB (30TB??? WOW!) and any attempt to initialize, offline, etc, yields error message "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Is it possibly the wrong partition type? I got the same results before doing any fiddling with the partitions (i.e. new out of box). Then I used gdisk to set GPT partition type and create a single partition, still got same error and incorrect size reporting from Windows guest.

Thanks for any advice!

Ryan Griggs
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  • To me this looks like a 512- vs 4096-byte sector size issue, especially due to the reported size being approx 30TB vs 3.5TB ( roughly 8 times, same as 512 vs 4096 byte sectors) but i dont know how to fix. Windows 2008 x64 is supposed to support 4096 byte sectors... Right? – Ryan Griggs Jan 05 '15 at 06:29
  • Is it impossible to passthru the device? Should i instead create a local storage repository for this drive? It was intended for backups... – Ryan Griggs Jan 05 '15 at 06:33
  • Looks like 4096-byte sectors may be the culprit... http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/306773-xenserver-56-and-problem-with-attached-4k-sector-usb-drive/ – Ryan Griggs Jan 05 '15 at 06:50
  • But what i don't understand is that the host sees and correctly reports the drive and its capacity, just fails to pass thru to guest. Is this a bug with the usb passthru system? – Ryan Griggs Jan 05 '15 at 07:05
  • Ok so I'm adding the drive as local storage instead, using this reference http://docs.vmd.citrix.com/XenServer/6.2.0/1.0/en_gb/reference.html?&_ga=1.176539810.602237306.1420439986#id475618 – Ryan Griggs Jan 05 '15 at 07:22
  • That failed also. I was able to add the SR, but then creating virtual disks on the SR yields errors and fails. – Ryan Griggs Jan 06 '15 at 20:54

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