Unable to mount 2TB+ HDD under Windows XP 32x

I believe you can leave it as master boot record and simply make 2 partitions.

Though honestly you really need to consider scrapping whatever piece of hardware is holding you back unless it is required by your job.

I myself have a couple pieces of old hardware that require xp 32bit to use all functions but would never go back to that dinosaur.

As ikkuranus said, XP does not support GPT drives; it only understands MBR. I'm not sure if you can format a > 2 TB drive into multiple partitions using MBR or if the total size of the drive matters, but even if you could do that, you'd have to copy everything from that drive somewhere else before you could reformat, and using multiple partitions isn't a very good workaround. If you have both XP and W7 machines on the same network, a simpler solution may be to just set up FTP access between them and use FTP to copy the files you need between machines, so that XP doesn't have to interact with the 3 TB drive directly. You can use Gigabit Ethernet with XP, so you could get 100 MB/s transfer rates between machines, which is better than you could get with USB 2.0.


If you can't put both machines on the same network, then really your only option is to buy two more 2 TB HDDs and copy the contents of the 3 TB HDD onto them.

Isn't the size limitation imposed by the controller? I have 4x2TB drives in a Windows 2000 Server machine, and all it needed was a PCI-to-SATA controller, and Windows recognized the drives, and I was able to create a 6 TB RAID5 dynamic drive in Windows 2000.


I would expect the same or better functionality in XP.

While yes the controller does set the maximum size it shouldn't be an issue for the built in ports on any modern motherboard with uefi.

You really can't compare windows 2000 server family with xp as it's designed for servers and most likely has a software component to deal with overcoming mbr limitations.

I suspect the regular windows 2000 pro for workstations wouldn't have that functionality just as xp don't.



Quote:
Originally Posted by blueiedgod  /t/1518285/unable-to-mount-2tb-hdd-under-windows-xp-32x#post_24368892


Isn't the size limitation imposed by the controller? I have 4x2TB drives in a Windows 2000 Server machine

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XP does have that functionality, because you didn't do what he's trying to do. You're using separate 2 TB drives, each with its own filesystem and MBR, and apparently a separate RAID controller card, which has its own hardware to manage the filesystems. XP supports RAID, but it doesn't support single drives with sizes > 2 TB, because XP can only mount drives with MBR, and > 2 TB drives require GPT.