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Convert to MBR? SOLVED

V

valorouswon

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 30, 2014
Messages
86
I have a 6tb external HDD, it was formatted as mac journaled but now I need it NTFS. When I use DISKPART and hit clean, the drive then goes back to two separate partitians, 2tb and 4tb. I stuck it into my Mac Book pro to format as Exfat and MBR, does not let me at all, MBR just fails everytime (and there is no MBR option in Sierra when partitioning).

How do I solve this?

specs

x79 UD5 GA
3930k
Windows 7 Ultimate

Thanks!
 
I'd try using gparted or similar LINUX utility and see what it says. Just download an load up a LiveCD image of Mint or Ubuntu, and use that to clean and format the drive.
 
drescherjm said:
MBR Does not support 6TB drives unless the drive uses 4K sectors.
Click to expand...

I thought of that limit when I read this, but did anyone ever MAKE a 6TB drive that didn't use larger sectors? I don't think I've ever seen or heard of one.
 
did anyone ever MAKE a 6TB drive that didn't use larger sectors?
Click to expand...

Externals should use 4K sectors but internals probably are 512 byte emulation. 512e will not work with MBR. Some drives are 512e but the external enclosure converts them to 4KN. If you shuck them they become 512e.
 
drescherjm said:
Externals should use 4K sectors but internals probably are 512 byte emulation. 512e will not work with MBR. Some drives are 512e but the external enclosure converts them to 4KN. If you shuck them they become 512e.
Click to expand...

Huh...learn something new every day. The only ones I'd heard of that used the "512e" instead of native 4K were some enterprise-rated SAS drives. I never imagined they (Seagate or WD) would cram those into a commercial enclosure.
 
The reason for the translation to 4KN allows you to use these big drives on pre vista machines that did not support GPT. Vista and above support GPT (at least as a data disk).
 
If ithe 6TB is external it should not have anything to do with your motherboard.

Is it a Bios thing?
Click to expand...

For booting BIOS support is needed. For data disks BIOS support should not be needed.

I use GPT on linux on 10+ year old motherboards with no BIOS GPT support at all. They will not boot to GPT drives however the OS has no issue at all using these as data disks.
 
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drescherjm said:
I use GPT on linux on 10+ year old motherboards with no BIOS GPT support at all. They will not boot to GPT drives however the OS has no issue at all using these as data disks.
Click to expand...

Actually you can boot from it, no problem. Just make a 1MB bios_grub partition. The grub code that would normally be on sectors 1-63 will be stored there.

Windows, on the other hand, requires EFI to boot from GPT disks.
 
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I'm not booting from it, these are internal SSDs used for data storage. When I uninstalled HSF+ they were not readable, so I converted through cmd to MBR and it's fixed. But, I have a 6tb external, which I can't get to MBR, because when I clean it with DISKPART, it sets it to it's original partitians, two large separate ones. The only way around that is to format through my macbrook pro as Exfat or Mac Journaled, then it becomes one full partitian. How do I convert this to MBR while it's till a full partitina??
 
Unless your drive is 4KN there is no way to make it MBR. Although good thing is you should not want it to be MBR anyways... Make it GPT. You may need to do this is gparted or some other utility instead of your windows or OSX builtin tools.
 
valorouswon said:
I'm not booting from it, these are internal SSDs used for data storage. When I uninstalled HSF+ they were not readable, so I converted through cmd to MBR and it's fixed. But, I have a 6tb external, which I can't get to MBR, because when I clean it with DISKPART, it sets it to it's original partitians, two large separate ones. The only way around that is to format through my macbrook pro as Exfat or Mac Journaled, then it becomes one full partitian. How do I convert this to MBR while it's till a full partitina??
Click to expand...

I'm missing something... If it is not intended to be bootable (I assume since it is external) , why does it matter if it is MBR? Windows Vista and newer will read GPT partitions all day long, and GPT should let you have the entire capacity of the drive in a single partition.
 
I think the reason he wants that was converting to MBR fixed his smaller drives. I think there was some problem with the GPT that the OSX utilities created that caused windows to ignore the drive. Creating a proper GPT should fix the issue.
 
drescherjm said:
I think the reason he wants that was converting to MBR fixed his smaller drives. I think there was some problem with the GPT that the OSX utilities created that caused windows to ignore the drive. Creating a proper GPT should fix the issue.
Click to expand...

In that case, I'd use DiskPart to clean it, and then just use the GUI to create the partiton - it should offer to make it GPT and format the whole things as a single NTFS partition right there (I KNOW this can ALL be done in DiskPart, but it is far easier to tell someone to have the GUI do it than to step them through the process in DiskPart).
 
Here's the problem:

-I had a hackintosh
-started formatting everything back to NTFS after leaving hackintosh
-once I uninstalled mac drive, windows 7 would not see the drives that were GPT, only the MBR ssds
-after cleaning then converting the SSDs back to MBR in diskpart, it was time to format the 6tb HDDs
-after cleaning them, it defaulted back to 2 big partitions

Now I plugged my external 6tb into my mac book pro instead, formatted as mac journalled an one 6tb partition, but that only works with GUID because it's a massive drive, it fails formatting if I try anything MBR.

Could there be a Bios setting? My rig is not that old, specs are in OP.
 
BIOS setting have no bearing on non-system volumes. GUID is your only option to get 1 partition on any drive larger than 2TB. Clean the disk in diskpart, and close it. Open disk manager; it'll prompt you to initialize the disk. Make sure you choose GPT. Then you can create a single partition that'll span the entire disk.
 
ryan_975 said:
BIOS setting have no bearing on non-system volumes. GUID is your only option to get 1 partition on any drive larger than 2TB. Clean the disk in diskpart, and close it. Open disk manager; it'll prompt you to initialize the disk. Make sure you choose GPT. Then you can create a single partition that'll span the entire disk.
Click to expand...


This just worked, weird because it was GPT the whole time, I guess re-doing the initialize disk made it readable by windows again. Thanks!
 
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