Using 4TB WD drives on M58p in Win/7 Pro x64

Question

After taking advantage of Cyber Monday deals in December, 2013 for Western Digital WD4001FAEX 4 TByte drives, I suddenly was faced with the "32-bit MBR" issue on systems with normal BIOS (not UEFI) like my 7630 and 7483 M58p Small Form Factor PC's.  My goal was to have a slightly less than 2 TByte C: drive with a D: drive partition around the same size starting BELOW "the 2 TByte line."  I read in the forums that this configuration was possible but NONE of these gave a HOW-To process.   I've successfully done this three times on a 7630-B81 and pair of 7483's (an AF2 and a W59) systems, all running licensed Win/7 Pro x64 operating systems.   I started out using the Recovery partition from the 7630-B81 cloned to each Western Digital drive with Acronis True Image Free WD Edition.  This created two partitions on each drive after performing a System Restore and applying genuine unique Microsoft Windows/7 Pro x64 product keys on each drive in each system.  There was a 9.77 GByte Recovery partition, and just under a 2 TByte C: drive.  The rest of the drive was "unallocated".   I applied all appropriate drivers for any new I/O and 170 or so Windows Updates including .NET Framework 4.51 code.  I downloaded XVI32 (free) for a hex editor and the free MBR Wizard Command Line version 2.0b to pull and restore the Master Boot Record (512 bytes).  I also installed the free version of EASUS Partition Master but this was only used to evaluate the number of available sectors in the "new" partition.
   I started the Win/7 Pro DISKMGMT command and decided to shrink the C: drive by 256 MBytes to expose a section of the 4 TByte drive that was below the "2 TByte line."   I created a new volume in that 256 MByte partition using DISKMGMT in order to establish a valid entry in the MBR's Partition Table.   I then used the MBRWiz command with the /save= parameter and provided a filename after the equal sign in order to save the current MBR contents, call it C:\Original.bin file.   Here is the contents of the 4 Partition tables in that file:
01BE     80 20 21 00 27 FE FF FF 00 08 00 00 00 80 38 01
01CE     00 FE FF FF 07 FE FF FF 00 88 38 01 00 78 BF FE
01DE     00 FE FF FF 06 FE FF FF 00 00 F8 FF 00 F8 07 00
01EE     00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
The 446 bytes before the address 1BE comprise the Boot program in the MBR.  The last two bytes are 55 AA after the 4th partition table entry (all zeros on this example.).
I took the last 4 bytes of the 3rd partition (Length Field) and modified them to "extend" the 256 MByte partition to nearly the end of the drive, editting with XVI32.   Here's the new 3rd Partition Table entry:
01DE    00 FE FF FF  06 FE FF FF 00 00 F8 FF 00 A0 C8 D1
(When the partition is formatted for NTFS, the byte at 01E2 changes from x'06' to x'07' (NTFS)).
I then use MBRWiz with the /restore= parameter to load the modified MBR file to the target drive.  If you are doing this to Drive 1, use the /Disk=1 parameter on the MBRWiz command line.  With the new MBR online, I then restart Windows/7 Pro x64.   The new partition of 1718548 MBytes is ready for formatting.  I checked my work with a 4-hour format of the new partition and all of the drives I formatted worked just fine 
The 4 TByte drive size apparently is the largest drive that this "trick" will work on with the 32-bit MBR.  This trick rely's on the "rule" that the last partition must START below "the 2 TByte line."  I was surprised the number of partitioning tools that I tried would NOT work to create this partition configuration declaring the space was above 2 TBytes.  Acronis True Image has a method to use the "unallocated" space, but it "creates" a Disk 1 out of that space and some applications like SpeedFan 4.49 will "crash" on that configuration.  SpeedFan 4.49 works just fine with the drive configuration created here.
Disclosure: I am NOT employed by any of the brands mentioned here, but am an IBM Retiree not in anyway affliated with them.

Answer 1

Unfortunately your only solution may be to upgrade all of the AA8 installations. Adobe does not support AA8 on Windows 7, though several have been successful on 32-bit systems. The 64-bit system has been a killer for AA8 from what I have seen. Maybe one person reporting success. You might see if it can run under a compatibility setting. It is also interesting to note that the list you posted only mentions AA8.1, not the 8.3.1 that you indicated at the beginning. That could possibly be the issue. Generally the early releases have not worked with 64-bit systems. If you install the updates (maybe from Help>Updates, or as a download from http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows) you will get the systems to run. Do expect potential problems if you continue to work with AA8, but you might be able to work it out. Good luck.