Paul wrote in
:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Dee
writes:
I recently bought a WD Elements 2 TB external drive. Win XP SP 3
was able to see the drive but was not able to format it to make
it usable. I had to download the WD Quick Formatter tool which
then formatted the drive in about a minute. The drive is now
recognized and is able to be used.
My question is, would this also work with a larger 4 or 5 TB
drive?
Thanks.
1. Can you tell us where you downloaded it from?
1a. Does it only work on WD drives?
2. Would it also get round whatever size limit Windows 7 has?
https://downloads.wdc.com/wdapp/WD_Q...r_2.0.0.65.zip
I used an older version, WD_Quick_Formatter_Win_1_2_0_10.zip, because
I wasn't sure that the lastest version would work on XP.
*******
I tried it out. It won't accept a WDC drive on a generic USB
controller. It must be intended specifically for Passport
or MyBook or similar products.
I found a claim, that some WDC products (could be those 5TB drives
with the USB connector right on the controller board), they may
be presenting 4Kn sectors to the OS. WinXP might not know how
to format such an item. The QuickFormatter might solve the
problem. However, I don't know how or if addressing from WinXP
works properly for that. The MBR may specify a 32bit number, and
by the controller on the drive using "fake" 4Kn sectors, the 32
bit number can represent drive sizes up to 16TB. But when the OS
goes to write to the 16TB volume, it must be aware the sectors
on the drive are 4K each. And will WinXP countenance such a
situation ? It's not clear from this what would happen.
This was what I had read too, something about removing the GPT and
making it MBR only, and something about 4K size to get around the XP
limitation.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...book/advanced-
format--4k--disk-compatibility-update?redirectedfrom=MSDN
This may be why the WD QuickFormatter exists, but I can't really
be certain. It's to cover the "non-standard" information the
USB interfaces on such drives present to the OS. You would
have to do more digging, to get a report of what logical
and physical sectors the drive is presenting, and how
it's possible via USB for that to not be a problem
(on WinXP, Vista, or Win7 - as Win8 and Win10 eventually
supported 4Kn for sure).
Even if you use the WD QuickFormatter, there is no particular
reason that any Partition Management software need work
properly. PowerQuest Partition Magic for example, does
not accept any shenanigans at all when it comes to such
issues. It's simply going to exit and tell you it won't
touch such a drive. There may be other programs that
will (eventually) decide they can't help you either.
This might also be why the drive only wants one partition
on there - it might have something to do with alignment,
or with the details of the "abomination" used to write
to the drive.
Yes, and one partition is fine for my usage.
The drive should be fine for the intended purpose, of supporting
writes from backup software.
Paul
Thanks, Paul. It sounds like it would work for a larger drive as
well, then.
Dee