Can you elaborate?

The drives work on a different computer

I can’t format them as I don’t have anywhere large enough to move the data to. Or rather I can but don’t want to for redundancy reasons They are holding identical copies of the same data while I can format one and play with it I am hesitant to do so incase the other fails

When the hard disk write more than 1.x TB，the data will be damaged.(2003 SP2's disk.sys)

So this 4k vs 512b cluster thing?

I don't konw about it.

Many external USB HDD can use more than 2TB, and use MBR partition.

https://superuser.com/questions/839556/can-ex … an-2tb-with-mbr

https://superuser.com/questions/562331/mbr-pa … redirect=1&lq=1

xingjz wrote on 2021-02-27, 05:28:

When the hard disk write more than 1.x TB，the data will be damaged.(2003 SP2's disk.sys) […]
Show full quote

Can you elaborate?

The drives work on a different computer

I can’t format them as I don’t have anywhere large enough to move the data to. Or rather I can but don’t want to for redundancy reasons They are holding identical copies of the same data while I can format one and play with it I am hesitant to do so incase the other fails

When the hard disk write more than 1.x TB，the data will be damaged.(2003 SP2's disk.sys)

So this 4k vs 512b cluster thing?

I don't konw about it.

Many external USB HDD can use more than 2TB, and use MBR partition.

https://superuser.com/questions/839556/can-ex … an-2tb-with-mbr

https://superuser.com/questions/562331/mbr-pa … redirect=1&lq=1

Have you actually experienced this yourself? What is your source for this information

Have you actually experienced this yourself? What is your source for this information

Sure, I've lost a lot of data.

xingjz wrote on 2021-02-27, 05:51:

Have you actually experienced this yourself? What is your source for this information

Sure, I've lost a lot of data.

Because of using these files? How can I test to see if it is happening on my setup?

The drives appear to be working fine on xp on sata except the 8tb one but that one isn’t showing up in bios for whatever reason. So I can’t even try it in xp. But the 12 tb seems fine.

You can copy many files to HDD, >2 TB. (I only copied the disk.sys, didn't use other ways)

Does anyone know what files are used for usb disks? I’m thinking I need to copy another file from 2003 to make the usb work.

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-02-27, 09:33:

Does anyone know what files are used for usb disks? I’m thinking I need to copy another file from 2003 to make the usb work.

Did you get this to work?
I'm confused what your situation was. Were you able to read GPT partitioned USB drives, JUST not of a certain size, or you could not read any USB drives with GPT?
I really need to use Windows XP to access a USB GPT hard drive. I don't even need internal support for GPT.

GPT is writable and readable with XP 64bit and 7 64 bit OS but not *bootable* except win 7 64 and any 64bit editions later has to be booted on UEFI bios.

Excerpt: "Can Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and later read, write, and boot from GPT disks? Yes, all versions can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems."

Second: " Whether the 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 read, write, and boot from GPT disks? Starting with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, all versions of Windows Server can use GPT partitioned disks for data. Booting is only supported for 64-bit editions on Itanium-based systems."

GPT is excellent format for partitions but you have to keep this in mind with OSes limitations.

Cheers,

Sorry for the necroposts... Had anyone actually tested on a relatively modern PC (whose BIOS could correctly report sizes for disks more than 2TB) whether 2003's disk.sys would work without any corruption when writing past 2TB on XP? I'm asking it just to be sure it's not a platform-independent issue (that is, a bug/limitation in XP itself rather than being caused by BIOS).

I once tried 2003's disk.sys which indeed allowed me to access a 3TB GPT HDD on XP, but it ended up corrupted when I wrote data past 2TB. At that time I put the blame on BIOS as it overflowed when calculating disk size, reporting the 3TB HDD being about 900GB (~3TB minus 2TB)... so I realized the data loss warning I got when I was using Hard Disk Sentinel was no joke. (BTW: I suspect if your BIOS exhibits this behavior, you're not safe on more modern OSes like Win7 or Linux, either.)

Testing is simple (make sure the files are properly backed up): If your >2TB GPT HDD partition currently has about like 1.8TB of files in it, you can simply do it by writing about 200-300GB more data to the disk, and see whether or not you get an error suggesting you need to run chkdsk utility, at least that was the case for me. Back then when I wrote files past that point, the disk suddenly became inaccessible and that message popped up, and I got tons of corrupted data errors reported when I did chkdsk the partition in question.

In conclusion, Win2003's disk.sys already answered the question about accessing GPT drives in general, mainly those of 2TB or less. I don't have such environments to test anymore, as I now mainly use SSDs of 2TB or less in size for pretty much all systems meant for relatively legacy purposes.

Synaps3 wrote on 2023-05-02, 05:49:

I don't even need internal support for GPT.

In that case, if you don't mind performance being affected, presumably you could run an operating system that does support GPT in a virtual machine, e.g. under VirtualBox. Software like VirtualBox can generally be set up to directly access a physical disk, so you could run a version of Windows which supports GPT in a VM, attach the USB drive to the VM, set up shared folders between the VM and your Windows XP host, and then within the VM, copy between the USB drive and the shared folders. It's a bit tedious, but so long as VirtualBox's support for direct disk access works, it seems safer to me than changing your operating system's drivers (but then so many people apparently do that it's probably well-tested).

Since you're using a USB drive, it may actually be easier than the normal case of direct disk access, since I think you can just tell VirtualBox to take ownership of the USB device when it is plugged in so that Windows XP never tries to access it, and it appears as a USB drive within the VM. If it wasn't a USB drive, you'd probably have to do something more complicated where you make a .vdi file which maps to the disk, and then attach that .vdi file to your VM as if it was a disk image (but don't take that from me, you'd need to read the documentation to find out exactly what to do).

However, I think the free version of VirtualBox only emulates USB 1, so attaching it as a USB disk might affect performance really badly, and you might need to attach it in the same way you would if it was an internal disk drive attached via IDE or SATA. Alternatively I think that if you install the "VirtualBox Extension Pack" it will emulate USB 2 and 3. My information might be quite out-of-date though.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-05-04, 15:51:

GPT is excellent format for partitions but you have to keep this in mind with OSes limitations.

Indeed. And as you say, also BIOS limitations. Only UEFI can boot from GPT.
What this boils down to is that you can use GPT on BIOS systems, as long as you use an extra disk that is standard MBR, so the BIOS can boot from that, and you can set up your boot manager there.
After all, booting is a two-stage process:
First the BIOS/UEFI loads the basic boot manager.
The boot manager will then load the actual OS.
This means that you can install a GPT-compatible boot manager on an MBR disk, so you can also boot into OS installations stored on GPT partitions.

I have a legacy BIOS system that is set up as follows:
First disk is a 1 TB SSD, formatted as MBR.
Second disk is a 4 TB SSD RAID0, formatted as GPT.

The system has Windows XP, XP x64, Vista x64, Windows 7, Windows 10 and Windows 11 installed.
The first disk contains the Windows bootmgr from Windows 11, which allows you to boot into any of these OSes, on either MBR or GPT partitions.
Windows 10 and 11 are installed on partitions of the GPT disk, and will be booted directly from there.
All the other OSes are installed on the first disk, as they cannot be booted from a GPT partition (at least, not with a legacy BIOS in the case of Windows 7).
With the exception of XP 32-bit, all the OSes can see and use the GPT partitions, so you can still use these disks to install applications on and store data.

I suppose with the hack mentioned in this thread, by replacing a device driver with one from a newer Server version, the 32-bit XP would also be able to see and use the GPT disks.

Synaps3 wrote on 2023-05-02, 05:49:

Did you get this to work? I'm confused what your situation was. Were you able to read GPT partitioned USB drives, JUST not of a […]
Show full quote

Sphere478 wrote on 2021-02-27, 09:33:

Does anyone know what files are used for usb disks? I’m thinking I need to copy another file from 2003 to make the usb work.

Did you get this to work?
I'm confused what your situation was. Were you able to read GPT partitioned USB drives, JUST not of a certain size, or you could not read any USB drives with GPT?
I really need to use Windows XP to access a USB GPT hard drive. I don't even need internal support for GPT.

I never did get this to work the way I wanted. Windows file protection kept giving me crap and gpt on usb never worked.

My setup was a dual pentium 1 setup (real hardware) not virtual box

i used PARAGON GPT Loader years ago, really nice to use gpt on xp sp3 with no problems, OTB is the best i think.

Gumur.gurl wrote on 2023-05-18, 02:18:

i used PARAGON GPT Loader years ago, really nice to use gpt on xp sp3 with no problems, OTB is the best i think.

Do you have the software still?

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-05-18, 02:54:

Gumur.gurl wrote on 2023-05-18, 02:18:

i used PARAGON GPT Loader years ago, really nice to use gpt on xp sp3 with no problems, OTB is the best i think.

Do you have the software still?

Hell yeah, i have a bunch of old cd´s with my retro programs, MP me and i give you my dropbox for download.

Will it upload here? Or too large?

FYI, regarding Paragon GPT loader, which is discontinued commercial software.

Only internally connected single 2.2TB+ drives are supported, not external storages, or those combined into RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks).

from https://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/gpt-loader/#

and for some insane reason it's also not found on many peoples favorite download site. 😒

Darn.

Post deleted.
So called "abandonware" is not supported here.

Post deleted due to mentioning a software product that is not legal to download.