So my dad had some stuff he wanted to pass over to me in Penang, so I brought along my WD 1TB drive, neatly formatted to NTFS on my Win7 machine before I left KL. Connected it to my dad's Win XP machine... hardware detected, no drive showed up in My Computer. Weird... but fortunately I had my Win8 laptop machine with me so I connected it. Looked fine. Maybe NTFS issue? No problem, I reformatted as exFAT. Reconnected to the Win XP machine... still no go. Brought it back to the Win8 laptop, had a look at Disk Management. Hmm, there's about 200MB in some weird protected GPT partition thingy. Tried to remove it, Disk Management doesn't allow it so I did it the manual way -- use DISKPART from command prompt. Okay, all formatted and good to go... reconnect to Win XP machine, no go again. Weird ass issue. Back to Win8 machine. Everything still looks good here. Ok so new strategy: wipe the drive empty and then do the formatting on the XP machine. Again, used DISKPART to make sure the drive is completely blank -- no partitions, nada, zilch. Reconnect to Win XP machine... still no go WTF??? OK, I checked Disk Management on the XP machine. The entire empty drive registered as a huge 1TB (well, 931GB) protected GPT partition. WTF??? OK fine, last resort. Run DISKPART on the XP machine, wipe the drive clean, then reformat on the XP machine itself. Finally a drive letter showed up. T__T
That's probably because your dad's computer is running the 32-bit Windows XP. Correct? See the first table in Tech ARP - ED#171 : Should You Select MBR Or GPT When You Install A New Drive? Rev. 4.0 Only the 64-bit version of Windows XP can read from or write to GPT partitions. In 32-bit Windows XP, you need to use the old MBR partition type.
