I don't quite understand the dictatorship in this forum
I didn't share any link I just told @Sphere478 the way to find the software utility he was looking for.
I can't PM you (more censorship) but maybe you can PM me.

It's not very hard. Don't mention or post links to such software if you don't agree then don't use these forums.
Windows XP is not free to download just because you think it should be.

kasfruit wrote on 2023-06-28, 16:28:

I don't quite understand the dictatorship in this forum
I didn't share any link I just told @Sphere478 the way to find the software utility he was looking for.
I can't PM you (more censorship) but maybe you can PM me.

It's difficult to say. I should have pointed out that you should avoid mentioning things like those in this forum, the brief moment I read the now-deleted posts.

Personally I had got myself into hot water several times because of the problems around those things in some other forums, and that was a long time ago.

There are better places to discuss about those, just not here. And plus, for these things, Google will NOT help you. Use some other tools like DuckDuckGo.

DosFreak wrote on 2023-06-28, 19:10:

Windows XP is not free to download just because you think it should be.

LOOOL go tell that to archive.org and other webs that host genuine ISO's

LSS10999 wrote on 2023-06-29, 00:37:

Personally I had got myself into hot water several times because of the problems around those things in some other forums, and that was a long time ago.

There are better places to discuss about those, just not here. And plus, for these things, Google will NOT help you. Use some other tools like DuckDuckGo.

no thanks, that Duckshit is not meant for me.

the discussion was about Paragon GPT loader and I shared a possible source for download (without links)

I don't use it myself but it may be useful for others that are XP fans like me or that got into trouble with the WS2003 system files

I know this is not probably the best topic , but how do I re-do/rebuild the data tree on a broken partition on a 1 TB drive? (it see's the partition under T.d. for example, and I can access there) but it won't save the file-format so I can access from a normal explorer....

BTW , for NAS I am using a cheap ZyXEL NSA310S , it works fine with evrything , even broken sata disks.(saved me a few unformatable disks).

Question: is it better to have a drive strictly for gaming or okay for the OS and games to be in same drive? I plan to run a 2tb ssd with no partition.

slowmf wrote on 2023-07-05, 02:11:

Question: is it better to have a drive strictly for gaming or okay for the OS and games to be in same drive? I plan to run a 2tb ssd with no partition.

I don't think this is the right place to discuss this. This thread is more about getting GPT disks working properly on XP. Formal GPT disk support only came to be since Windows 2003, though not for booting, and probably still limited to 2TB or less.

Still, I don't think there is any noticeable difference for SSDs with OS and games being on the same drive or different ones. Most systems only ship with a single drive after all.

EDIT: I'm making this edit to avoid double-posting.

kasfruit wrote on 2023-06-29, 02:04:

the discussion was about Paragon GPT loader and I shared a possible source for download (without links)

I don't use it myself but it may be useful for others that are XP fans like me or that got into trouble with the WS2003 system files

I did manage to find someone who uploaded the Paragon GPT loader to the Internet Archive. You should be able to easily find it via DuckDuckGo search.

It appears Paragon GPT loader, at least the officially released versions, had serious issues with accessing files located above 2TB. More contexts about the issues can be found here and here.

Haven't tested it, but according to the one who uploaded it to the archive, despite using the patched driver, Windows may not boot if more than 2TB data is written to the disk. Not sure what exactly the issue was, but in overall using disks larger than 2TB with XP is not a good idea regardless of which option you use (be it GPT loader or Win2K3's files).

kasfruit wrote on 2023-06-29, 02:04:

no thanks, that Duckshit is not meant for me.

DuckDuckGo is indeed inferior when it comes to mainstream stuffs. If you want to search mainstream stuffs and privacy is not a concern for your search context then stay with Google for those.

It is certainly useful, however, if your search topic involves something sensitive, especially when it comes to things that would run into dee-emm-*censored*-A.

Has anyone got a large HDD with 4Kn sectors ?

they are mostly enterprise disks https://www.westerndigital.com/products/inter … hdd?sku=0B36400

I know that some external enclosues may turn any disk into a 4kn one but I don't actually know which ones for a fact

I really want to know if XP would be able to format them without using this unreliable GPT patch

Why GPT ?

You can expand your MBR (SATA) Drive (at least) to 4 TB with ease.

I use winXP SP3 32-bit (primary) and GPT makes a lot of problems.

https://care.acronis.com/s/article/38937-True … jk0&ckattempt=1

Symptoms
An operation attempt with a drive larger than 2 TB fails with following error:
Please install Virtual Disk driver manually

http://dl2.acronis.com/u/kb/VirtualDiskSetup.msi

i think the latest version is from 2014

There are only few informations in internet about this tool.

The program opens the space above 2TB as additional "2TB" virtual disk.
You see this in "Computermanagment". They are "primary" !!

In Explorer you see the full capacity of all your partitions.

I have tested sucessfully with Seagate 4 TB SATA
ST4000DM004 > 4K physical emulated at 512-byte sectors
Barracuda SATA Product Manual 100805918, Rev. P December 2020

You DONT need Seagate Extended Capacity Manager.

Another person tested with a WD30EZRX 3 TB WD Caviar Green
https://windowsforum.com/threads/hd-disk-mana … 40/#post-646781
Interface SATA 6 Gb/s
Advanced Format (AF) Yes

So it should work with disks from all manufacturers.

I have tested on a "old" MSI Board without UEFI.

I have tested with XP SP3 32bit , W2k3 64bit and Win11 23h2 64bit
(yes ! - win11 works with MBR - without UEFI !)

I have not tested with SSD.

I make a full capacity test with h2testw_1.4 without errors
4 TB write and test takes about 13 hours !!

It would interesting for me if the tool works with capacity more than 4 TB.
Maybe someone can test it.

But in "future" XP-users have another problem if
the disk provides no more 512e emulation
http://wp.xin.at/archives/2581
and if there are no more actual browsers

Greetings : LarryM from germany

Wanted more than 4tb

I'm partitioning my new 4TB data HDD with legacy OSes access in mind...
I use internal SATA3 controller of intel P67 chipset in IDE mode (MB from my signature). First problem I met is that BIOS/EDD is too old/buggy so it reports total LBA capacity in low Dword only while high Dword is 0 -> all DOS/Win98SE and even WinXP SP3 OS sees the HDD as 1,6TB instead of 4TB (3519069872 sectors instead of 7814037168).
I already replaced disk.sys, partmgr.sys and mountmgr.sys from Windows Server 2003 SP2 but nothing has changed, WinXP probably still prefer wrong BIOS/EDD value passed via ntdetect/ntldr. This seems to happen only with standard IDE drivers (AHCI and other non-intel controllers with own sys driver should rely on correct ATA identify values) but because of other legacy OSes I don't want to switch to AHCI. The best would be BIOS mod to fix the EDD but isn't there some hacked ntdetect/ntldr that use ATA identify value instead of EDD?
Then I plan to use hybrid MBR to create second 2TB partition behind 2TB with limited access for GPT-aware systems.
I don't want to go Paragon way as I read more complains about it.

BTW I think that there's non-desctructive way to test if there's potential data loss problem due to rollover.
Just fill the low 2TB partition and then use disk editor (e.g. WinHex) to explore high 2TB partition. On new HDD it's all initialized to zeros. If you see some non-zero data this would be mostly the alias from the lower partition. In such case don't try to write anything. If this bad thing will happen I can live with it that the high partition will be used only for Win7x-64 and Linux...

I tried temporary switch to AHCI and it has different AHCI BIOS that supports EDD 3.0 and reports the correct value of total LBA sectors. WinNT4 with UniATA booted in AHCI mode without a problem bu they still see only 1,6TB so even when EDD fixed it is still truncated somewhere else so no need further EDD experiments...

I also tried to manually create another primary partition that fills the rest from 1,6TB to the end (under W7-x64) and found there's visible aliasing behind 2TB of absolute LBA address! So even that Windows sees this partition normally it would cause data loss when I try to write there. The same in Win98 and DOS7/FreeDOS. So it doesn't make sense to expose 2nd partition in MBR to legacy OSes but safer would be if it will be defined only in GPT for newer OSes only (via hybrid MBR).

I try with gdisk to create a hybrid MBR partition on a GPT disk and all the disk is converted to MBR. How you create a hybrid MBR?

I'm a bit disappointed of various partition resizing tools (to expand existing FAT32 from 1,6TB to 2TB). I tried many ~10 tools and was surprised about the problems. Many of them just reported invalid partition or invalid size of current partition and so didn't allow to resize. Some others started resizing but hanged with zero disk activity after some time or ended with some error while partition (and data) left untouched. I run them under w7-x64 to have proper 64b arithmetics. The last I tried was Paragon Partition Community Edition x64 [ https://www.paragon-software.com/free/pm-express/# ] relative new SW - it resized the partition after cca 1/2 hour but screwed the data. Root dir looks fine but when I opened subdirs there was a garbage. Even it screwed my extended partition with FAT16 logical drives a crazy way they can be accessed under Windows and linux but DOS6/7 throws error when acesing them. Record in partition table seems OK. So I just going to wipe all that crap, repartition manually and load from a backup that takes several hours on such amount of data...
So just beware such tools promising "partition resize without data loss". In the past I used Powerquest Partition Magic (the latest 8.05 for DOS) to resize FAT16/32 partitions and I never had a problem but this old tool can't handle such big drivers.

RayeR wrote on 2026-05-04, 15:51:

I'm a bit disappointed of various partition resizing tools (to expand existing FAT32 from 1,6TB to 2TB). I tried many ~10 tools and was surprised about the problems. Many of them just reported invalid partition or invalid size of current partition and so didn't allow to resize. Some others started resizing but hanged with zero disk activity after some time or ended with some error while partition (and data) left untouched. I run them under w7-x64 to have proper 64b arithmetics. The last I tried was Paragon Partition Community Edition x64 [ https://www.paragon-software.com/free/pm-express/# ] relative new SW - it resized the partition after cca 1/2 hour but screwed the data. Root dir looks fine but when I opened subdirs there was a garbage. Even it screwed my extended partition with FAT16 logical drives a crazy way they can be accessed under Windows and linux but DOS6/7 throws error when acesing them. Record in partition table seems OK. So I just going to wipe all that crap, repartition manually and load from a backup that takes several hours on such amount of data...
So just beware such tools promising "partition resize without data loss". In the past I used Powerquest Partition Magic (the latest 8.05 for DOS) to resize FAT16/32 partitions and I never had a problem but this old tool can't handle such big drivers.

PartitionMagic was an excellent tool that always worked, but it could not handle MiB-aligned partitions -- if you create the "System Reserved" partition during Windows 7 install then PartitionMagic will report an error on the disk.

I mainly use GParted from a Linux live environment to do partitioning nowadays. It can do most of the common work I used to do with PartitionMagic and can properly handle MiB-aligned partitions.

I don't have much experience with Windows-based partitioning utilities, and some of those appear to lock a good amount of essential features behind paywalls, that I can already do with GParted or other Linux-based GUI/CLI tools.

PQmagic has some issues when CHS and LBA entries doesn't match as it wants to have it just throw error instead. And for big HDDs it's impossible address big LBA with CHS...

BTW the 1MB alignment of the beginning of the partition is usually not enough to have aligned all the necessary FS structures and data iself.
E.g. on a FAT16 partition you start aligned with DOS bootsector but it's then immediatelly followed by FAT 1st copy, FAT 2nd copy and rootdir table. The size of FAT depends on how many clusters the FS hve to address. rootdir table can be also configured to variable size. So it usually happen your FATs and data will start at unaligned LBA. One Vogons member presented his YSDDT tool http://ysbits.net/ysddt/ that tries to resolve this problem via changing the reserved sectors value (dummy sectors inserted between dos bootsector and 1st FAT) to reach alignment. Also it can be done manually with precise calculation of partition/FS size that affect the FAT size but it needs some iterations so tricky... But I guess that for such a modern, big and fast HDD with huge cache the impact on speed under DOS would be negligible.... 😀