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Opinions/Advice/Solution needed.

I ordered a 2TB WD "Passport" backup drive for a computer running WinXP.

I must have still been under anesthesia thinking,

1) XP would recognize such a large hard drive,

AND . . .

2) that this 2TB passport would NOT come GPT formatted which XP also does not recognize.

At this point upgrading the PC to Win7 or Win 10 is not an option.

I need to backup all current data on the XP's 500GB drive as well as an already full WD500GB "MY Book" external hard drive.

I'm thinking I have to remove the GPT type format (if XP is going to recognize it) and most likely that will mean 4 separate logical 500GB NTFS partitions or no?

Can I leave this passport intact at 2TB and reformat it to NTFS or at least separate logical 1TB partitioned NTFS drives?

Any input will be highly appreciated

1 Answer 1

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Windows XP can recognise a 2TB drive (which is about the maximum size of a disk which does not require GPT). Simply repartition it as a single 2TB disk using with MBR, and reformat using NTFS (or whatever format works best for your needs)

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  • I found a link to paragon-software.com/technologies/components/gpt-loader/… which appears to be some kind of driver to support GPT on Windows XP if you want to shell out US$20 for the privilege as an alternative solution. (I've not tried it)
    – davidgo
    Mar 14, 2017 at 2:26
  • thanks davidgo, i'm trying a linux progie called gpart to mbr and will attempt to reformat to ntfs
    – pclaptop
    Mar 14, 2017 at 6:12
  • Ok. If that doesn't do it, just use "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1" to overwrite the initial MBR, unplug the disk and plug it in again, then use fdisk to partition it. (I'm sure gparted will work fine, I've just not used it much)
    – davidgo
    Mar 14, 2017 at 6:52
  • Got a 2TB USB on my box and XP sees it just fine. Wasn't GPT, when I got it, but Gparted Live sees it, and has partitioned it for me just fine. Best to let XP do the formatting though.
    – Chindraba
    Mar 14, 2017 at 7:11
  • thanks gypsy i used diskpart to clean drive, and then partitioned it as NTFS and WinXP recognized it fine.
    – pclaptop
    Mar 15, 2017 at 9:37

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