Wednesday, April 6, 2016

How to Format a TB Drive for Windows XP

UPDATE:
Use MacOS' Disk Utility to format a drive to MS-DOS (FAT) with a Master Boot Record scheme! This is absolutely the best way to format a large volume for use on Windows XP and Mac.


You need GParted. Get it and dd it to a flash drive. Get the latest test version for fun.

Run the "Create Partition Table" on the correct device. This will obliterate your partitions, but it will also ensure you have a clean Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table. Running this command first would have saved me hours and days of frustration.

Now, you can just simply use GParted to create new FAT32 partitions of your fresh partition table device. You do not want to have any flags like "lba" on any of them. Apply all the changes and your drive is ready to go!

Screenshots of Terminal are not working as of 25.0-4 on the Macbook. I submitted the bug, and it is still open at GParted Screenshot 0 Bytes Bug. Hope they fix that someday. Screenshots just don't take when it is of the Terminal window. Why mention Terminal?

Good question. I tried so many things with testdisk in attempt at figuring out why, when the drive is connected to Windows XP, XP will not boot. That is the quest that led me to use GParted to create a new partition table from scratch.

So, if Windows XP will not boot when your drive is connected, most likely there is a partition table funk going on. What I cannot say from knowing little about this area of expertise.

To recap and put in list form:
  1. GParted > Create Partition Table
  2. Partition FAT32 in GParted
  3. Enjoy
Have a great day and format a TB drive for Windows XP and Mac.