![]() I hope I can be forgiven for reviving an old thread. Technical details: partitioning - Is it possible to set the logical sector size of a USB hard disk drive? - Super User After it fails, disconnect and reconnect the drive, and then delete and recreate & format the partition yourself using Disk Management. WD Quick Formatter 2.0.0.65 partially works in Windows XP: it successfully changes the sector size to 4096, but it fails to format. WD Quick Formatter 1.2.0.10 works correctly in Windows XP and formats for Windows XP compatibility, but that’s an old version and I don’t think you can download it from Western Digital. ![]() Run the app in Windows 7 compatibility mode and it will present the “XP Compatible” option on the format screen, which sets the sector size to 4096 bytes, creates an MBR partition table, and creates & formats a single partition filling the entire drive. That’s the latest version of the tool as of this writing, available at How to Format an External Drive Using WD Quick Formatter. You can use WD Quick Formatter 2.0.0.65 in Windows 10. Use WD Quick Formatter to fix these problems. Out of the box they may be configured with a 512 byte sector size and a GPT partition table which Windows XP doesn’t like. I can confirm that the Western Digital 8 TB Easystore (WDBCKA0080HBK), 12 TB Easystore (WDBCKA0120HBK), and 14 TB Easystore (WDBCKA0140HBK) external USB drives work correctly in Windows XP. I did the actual disc formatting on a non-XP machine using Windows 7ĭisc must use MBR and possibly NTFS – definitely not GUID This trick with that bit of tech should theoretically let XP see drives up to just under 17TB.Ī couple of other bits that may or may not be relevant: I emphasise that this would only be possible using that generation of drive cases pre about 2016 that includes the little wonder chip. There are a few good video guides on YouTube about how to do it. The whole operation of swapping the drives inside their cases took less than 15 minutes the trickiest bit was not snapping the plastic clips that hold the box together. So I swapped out the old 4TB drive inside that Seagate case with my new 8TB one, using the same connector bridge, and… hey, presto, my XP system is happy with its new 8TB hard drive! However, in the old days WD, Seagate (and others) got round that by including a cunning little chip in the “bridge” hardware in their external hard drive cases that fooled XP into thinking that 4MB clusters were 512K clusters and, well, short version is it allowed XP systems to see bigger volumes - like my 4TB drive that was failing. ![]() I wanted a new drive to work on an old 32-bit Windows XP operating system, and as many people have discovered, XP can’t see hard drives bigger than 2.1TB. I confirm it works on both the older 107C Element drives from 2015 and the current 2017 model Element which is the 25A3. Please note I have tested this on the rounded My Books and confirm it works, but I have not tested the rectangular My Books. If you removed the drive and put it into your computer it would not be recognized. Obviously, the external enclosure is needed for a 4TB MBR partition. ![]() The USB interface still contains the emulation needed for XP, even though WD now defaults to a GPT partition. I then connect it to my XP machine and I can read and write to the the full 4TB partition, no extra software needed. I select XP Compatible in the format options and it creates a single 4TB MBR partition. To make the 4TB drive XP compatible, I connect it to a Windows 7 machine and format with the WD utility. But the current My Book and Elements (model 25A3) have a GPT partition and need to be reformatted to work with XP. The older 4TB My Book and Elements (model 107C) used to come with a MBR partition. I am an XP user and can say that the 4TB My Book and Element drives are still working with XP.
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