Large external disk

[armadillo]

Has anyone here succeeded in using a 3TB SATA III disk as non-bootable storage in an external USB2 enclosure under Windows XP 32 bit?
Alternatively, has anyone tried to do so and found it to be impossible?

I have asked Seagate presales support but it would not surprise me if they just refer me to non-existent help in their knowledgebase. They have some free software that they say gets round the problem but its instruction manual does not mention it at all. Acronis DiskDirector does it too and I am about to wade through its manual to see if it tells me how.

Background. The theory is a bit involved. Under 32 bit OS's the structure of the disk's MBR imposes a limit of 2TB on the size of "something" because that is the maximum number of 512byte sector addresses that can be accommodated within a binary number less than 2^32. Not sure if "something" is the disk or the partition. If the limit is just on the partition then a 3TB disk can simply be partitioned into two 1.5TB partitions. If the limit is on the disk then it is a problem. It is also possible to format the disk as a GPT disk rather than an MBR disk. That removes the 2TB limit but it is not clear (to me) whether that works under 32 bit Windows.

Hence I ask if anyone has actually succeeded or failed, either of which will give me a clue should Seagate not give me an intelligible answer. Normally, I solve these things via Google. But there is a lot of conflicting explanation on this topic on the web.