Writing to 2 TB USB hard drive fails

[Rich Hare <freeprich@gmail.com>]

I am new to Debian, but learning.

My issue involves 2 TB USB hard drives.

I have been using Debian via the Knoppix bootable CD to back up a couple
of Win XP computers.  Has been working wonderfully with a 500 GB drive 
I've used
and also a 1 TB drive. 

I recently purchased a couple of 2 TB drives for this purpose, but have 
a problem. 
The drives will mount; the backup (70-80 GB) will start, but terminates 
without error
message after a few folders are copied; leaving a bad file or two 
behind.  (Windows reports
the files are bad and can't even delete them).  I tried partitioning the
drive into two 1 TB partitions, but this, too, does not work.  I've 
used a Seagate utility to
check if the drives have 512 byte sectors or 4096 byte sectors and they 
are 512 byte NTFS
sector drives.

The drives work well with WinXP.  My present work-around is to make my 
backup
using one of the smaller drives and then copy it over to one of the 2 TB 
drives, but this
is a kludge, long-term.

If you have any suggestions, or ideas for further tests, I would 
appreciate them.

Rich