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I just split a 3TB ext HDD in GPT
I bought a Seagate 3 TB external HDD, ($99 at Best Buy for Black Friday!)
I copied the Seagate stuff to my hard drive so I could copy it back later. The drive showed up in Win 7 as a full 3 TB NTFS drive. But I wanted two 1.5 TB partitions because I have a bunch of 1.5 TB drives to copy around. I tried to repartition it (in MBR mode) and wound up with two unallocated spaces that were unajoinable. I deleted the partition I did make NTFS and wound up with a 2048 MB unallocated space and another 765 MB unallocated space (I forgot the exact number).
I followed these directions:
Examining Drive Configurations
You can use the following methods to determine whether a drive is configured as a GPT or an MBR disk:
In the Disk Management console, on the View menu, point to Top, and then click Disk List. The upper pane displays a list of disk drives that specifies the partition style in the last column.
In the Disk Management console, right-click the drive to display conversion options:
If the drive is configured as an unpartitioned GPT disk, the Convert to MBR Disk option appears. If the drive is partitioned, this option is unavailable.
If the drive is configured as an unpartitioned MBR disk, the Convert to GPT Disk option appears (*this is what I did*). If the drive is partitioned, this option is unavailable.
In the Disk Management console, right-click the driver, click Properties, and then click the Volume tab to display the partition style and other information.
In Device Manager, right-click the drive and then on the Volume tab, click Populate to display the partition style and other information.
Start the DiskPart utility and enter the command list disk. The disk list indicates GPT or MBR in the last column of the command output.
Using GPT Drives
I made each partition half the size of the original total size (+/- a few MB), but I think those numbers are just slightly less than my other 1.5 TB drives, so doing a sector by sector clone from the other drive to the USB 3.0 partitions would probably fail.
1.5 TB drive was 1,500,299,264,000 vs. partitions on USB 3.0 drive of 1,500,229,136,384 and 1,500,227,039,232, AAAAK!!!!
So I'm spending a few days copying over stuff from my USB 2.0 drives to my new USB 3.0 drives at 10-25 MB/second so I can start burning stuff to Blu-Ray using just USB 3.0.
My Win XP computer died recently, but it just may need a new CMOS/BIOS 3 volt battery, I haven't looked into it yet, I've been too busy with the Win 7 machine to give it a thought. But I was wondering if my new USB 3.0 drive partitioned this way would be seen properly in Win XP SP3 32 bit or would it hang up at the 2 GB barrier, or just show the first partition, or just not appear at all. I've assigned each partition a drive letter already, L: and M:. Would that be enough to meet Win XP, or would Win XP just choke on MBR stuff anyway?
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