I hope you can help me, I have this two 2.5" hard drives (250 and 500GB, respectively) that I put inside Acteck USB 2.0 drive cases and formatted them under linux, creating a new GPT partition table (using gdisk
) and adding only one partition of type 0700 (windows regular data) formatted as NTFS using mkntfs
with default parameters (i.e. I did not set any cluster or sector size) just mkntfs /dev/sdb1
on each drive.
Both of them work flawlessly under Linux, I can mount them and browse the files on them; but only one of them is visible under Windows (the 500GB one), the other one simply shows up as unallocated data on the drive manager and it asks me to create a new partition table on it. I have connected them several times on several different ports on the same windows machine with the same results; I have connected both of them on the same machine running a live version of Linux too and both drives work perfectly fine. I also connected it on the same linux box on which I formatted it and it shows on Thunar but then I started a Windows VM and connected the drive to it and it has the same effect, so I'd say that this is an issue with Windows.
This is how it's shown on every Windows machine I've connected it (including the VM):
This is the output of gdisk /dev/sdb -l
for the 250GB one:
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.0
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sdb: 488397168 sectors, 232.9 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 013E97B6-B8DE-4D39-A9A6-B9A8704370B6
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 2048, last usable sector is 488397134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 0 sectors (0 bytes)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 488397134 232.9 GiB 0700 Ariel250GB
And this is the output of gdisk /dev/sdb -l
for the 500GB one:
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.0
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sdb: 976773168 sectors, 465.8 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 963D42B4-A1C2-449F-93BF-9197F904809A
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 976773134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 976773134 465.8 GiB 0700 Ariel500GB
Edit:
I've only tested it using Windows 7 since I don't have any Windows 8 machine near. I also used fdisk to create the partition table on one and gdisk for the other, but I can't remember which one I used on which.