Formatted back to NTFS from Mac Journaled, Windows does not see it. EFI issue?

Hello,

I just formatted a bunch of drives I used to have for a hack, back to NTFS. When I uninstalled HFS Plus 10.5, only 3 drives could be seen. All the drives that have (EFI System Partitian) cannot be seen withouth HSF installed.

I did a system restore and went back so everythign is ok during work, I'll have to mess with this more after this project is over.

My question is, how do I delete EFI? I can't do it thorughh Disk management, is there a way with CMD to completely format everything back to original contents? Or is there a way to just make it work without having to format and drag a bunch of files over agiain (this took over a week because HFS PLUS is a huge bottleneck on top of USB 3.0.

Specs

Samsung Pro 840 (all these work after uninstalling HSF)
EVO ssds 850 and 840
3930k
GA UD5 X79

Thanks!

Used method one, didnj't change anything

http://www.partition-tool.com/resource/delete-efi-system-partition.html

Sounds more like they're partitioned with GPT tables instead of MBR and you're using a version of Windows that doesn't support GPT partitioned drives, or is missing the GPT safety partition in the MBR. Do all of the drives show up in Disk Management as unallocated?

Update:

Deleted the EFI partitions, did nothing. They all say healthy primary partition, the only ones that are showing up are Disk 7 and 8 in that pic which are samsung pros 840, also my Main OS obviously works.

I dont get why it works when HSF plus is installed again if I wiped the drives, and the samsung Pro's work. Firmware is up to date, like that matters though

Okay, looks like you just need to assign them a drive letter. Right click on of the partitions, then see if you can see "Change Drive Letter and Paths...".

The crucial has a letter, and they all show letterr now, that must have been in the middle of formatting.

They are definitely GUID in disk management, now what? I'm assuming they have to be wiped again.

I tried method 2 here:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/convert-mbr-to-gpt-disk

Not sure if method 3 is any better, and I feel like I should be wiping instead of converting to avoid any future issues.

ryan_975 said:

Sounds more like they're partitioned with GPT tables instead of MBR and you're using a version of Windows that doesn't support GPT partitioned drives, or is missing the GPT safety partition in the MBR. Do all of the drives show up in Disk Management as unallocated?

Click to expand...

Anyone?

diskpart clean will completely wipe all settings from a drive
diskpart
list disk
select disk X (X is the disk you want)
clean
Sometimes the clean command will report an error, so I just run it again and it always works the 2nd time. Don't pick the wrong disk, or you'll regret it.

After that, you can go back to Disk Management and do the usual initialize and format.

Got it working. But now I'm reading MBR is old tech and modern moterhboards prefer GUID. I have x79 UEFI motherboard, and plan to upgrade to newest chipset in less than 2 years, so there should have been a solution in BIOS. Converting MBR was indeed a bad idea.

There's nothing to worry about with MBR vs GUID on disks that have a single partition and no bootable volumes.