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How to delete GPT Protective Partition

Paul Gu 15 years ago

Why we need to delete GPT protective partition?

In Windows XP Professional, you cannot access or modify GPT disk, but you can convert a GPT disk to MBR by using the clean command in DiskPart, which will delete GPT protective partition and remove all data and partition structures from the disk.

Warning: The steps below will erase all data on the GPT disk, please backup your data first.

  1. You might see HD Drive in GPT status on Disk Management.
  2. Go to DOS command line (click on "Start Menu", then "Run", type in "cmd" in textbox, and hit "OK")
    • Type in "DiskPart" in command line.
    • Type in "list disk" in command line to show all disks in this machine.
    • Use "select" to set the focus to the specified partition.
      For example "select disk 1".
    • Use "clean" command to remove GPT disk from the current in-focus disk by zeroing sectors.
  3. Go back to Disk Management, you can see GPT disk is "Not Initialized" now. 
  4. Within Disk Management, right click on disk info, choose "Initialize Disk", You can see GPT disk is "Unallocated" now.
  5. Right click on disk info, choose "New Partition…", follow Partition Wizard and format it. Now you are able to use the disk in Windows XP.

GPT Protective Partition

clean

Initialize Disk 

 New Partition

888 thoughts on “How to delete GPT Protective Partition”

  5. Brilliant! Searched for ages, got loads of bullsh*t advice. Been working in IT for 20 years, never heard of diskpart. Thanks, worked a treat!

  6. Hi Paul,

    Great post. After failing to intitalize disks with Vista (apparently Wetern digital has yet to create software compatible with Vista) I tried to make one GPT. Bad Idea. Disk Part helped me fix it and I will use XP to init from now on. Thanks!

  13. uhhhhh…. that hit the spot!

    after the end of fdisk with /MBR i really didn’t have to work much with partitions, but after trying MAC on a cetain disk I just didn’t have any option within Vista install to remove GPT tag from disk. After searching the google and after I found countless useles tools and advices (funny, how sata disables any chance of using good old fdisk :-)) this comes as a salvation.
    To be true, I am a little embarrased for not knowing diskpart – but in reality I never needed one until now.

    many thanks for publishing this!

  16. after a TON of website mis information, your fix took me 30 seconds. thank you!!!

  17. Hi Paul!!!

    You are the best and you’ve made my day!!! – thx again!!

    Tons of crap online to figure how to do that none of them are working or you have to buy some third part software!!! thx to bring a light on this unone (actually to me) dos command!

    Sincerely yours

    Marc

  19. Amazing! I’ve never heard of diskpart either before. I was able to reformat MAC original HDD’s to NTFS for windows.

  20. This is Amazing and it earned a place in my folder that I call Flint Important. Been in IT for more than ten years i never heard of disk part either Well done & this is cool beans!

  21. I have spent the nbest part of an hour trolling around the web trying to find how to sort this problem out.

    Found 7 ways, one of which incuded complete linux install, the rest were even worse. Then found this.

    Remind me to get you a sainthood 🙂

    Thanks v much

    Paul

  23. I have a drive that has a 200MB partition that is “GPT Protective Partition” and the rest of the drive is 698.44 GB NTFS which is “Healthy (System, Boot…).
    If I use your method will it erase all the data on the 698.44GB partition. I jusdt want to get rid of the GPT Protective Partition without loosing my data.
    Thanks

  24. Mac OS X Leopard creates a GPT instead of MBR on a connected USB disk. Your tip saved my day, thanks !

  26. Amazing! After searching forums for a half hour and downloading useless apps, I finally found this post. Where have you been all my hard drive’s life?

  33. Wow, Thank you so much. I was about to strangle my programmer who I let borrow my new hard drive while he did craziness with his Linux and MAC setup. You saved a life today! 🙂

  34. THANK YOU! Was pulling out my hair trying to find a solution to getting rid of a GPT partition on a drive I’m working on! I owe you one! Thanks again!

  36. THANK YOU!!! I Just bought an external HD and it wasn’t compatible with my XP2 until I found this! I was just about to return it! GREAT RESOURCE!!

  37. Gracias, Amigo. Fubared and set up the disk on my Vista machine. Need to swap betwee the Vista and my work XP system. All of the information on teh internets found using the google was pretty much b.s. (as another poster mentioned). This was tres helpful.

    Thanks again,
    -Mike

  39. Very nice post, lots of poor information out there, hopefully a few more links will drive your dead-on instructions to the top!

  42. Great, worked a treat many thanks….Now the prob i have is the disk is coming up with I/O error….. I dont suppose you know of a way to fix these? Or is that the end of my hard drive?

    Cheers

    Chris

  44. you are so awesome, i bought this 120 gb sata HD for my laptop for 25$ and i couldn’t for the life of me format it, but now i do
    thanks
    jackie
    😉

  46. Thanks a ton mate. I’ve got a laptop harddrive out in an enclosure connected to my PC and it was doing my head in that I couldn’t install an OS… it only made it worse that 90% of the internet was trying to assure me that you can install vista on a GPT protected partition no worries…. my ass you can…. It totally supports it… My ass it does…

    You’re a lifesaver.

  47. Thanks again and again Mate, Ebayed a 500mb disk to find this GPT thing,
    googled the solution in 2 mins.

    Learn something new every day i say

  51. WOW! I would have to say that turned out to be a lot easier than I was expecting! Thanks a million!

  52. Done this, but now the disk doesn’t show up as a volume in the top part of disk manager (and still doesn’t show in Windows Explorer). It shows in the bottom part, but i can’t change its drive letter in the bottom part.

    I’m dealing with an external hard drive that I reformatted to use with Time Machine for my Mac (unsuccessfully) and now want to go back to using as backup for my Windows XP PC

  57. Thanks so much! I was using an external drive as my backup disk for my Macbook, but needed something to transfer over files from one PC to another so I had to use it, but came across this error. Worked perfectly! Thanks!

  60. Like others, I spent a good hour searching the web, pulling out my hair, and talking to myself, looking for an answer. How can such a simple answer be so well-hidden?
    I think I want to have your love child, although my girlfriend (and science) might have issues with that.
    Suffice to say…thanks.

  67. I had a WD 1TB MyBook connected via FireWire to XP box with the same issue as all the rest (I had been using it under OSX 10.5 without a hitch – of course).

    I was about to reach for my http://sysresccd.org/ disc, but was too lazy to reboot and find this post in a google search – worked like a charm – TYVM!!!

    I too have been doing M$ for 20+ years and never heard of DISKPART (and I’m a dos/batch file junkie), so I go curious and find this article that gives more detail on the DISKPART command, it’s scripting abilities (scarry thought there), and detailed explanations of the various sub-commands:

    A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

  70. Awesome – thanks for the tip. I had never heard of DISKPART before and I thought I was cool. Anyways, you saved me after a Mac format.

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  75. This certainly is a great find.

    Any advice for trying to read the drive, with Win XP, before killin the partition? I am trying to retrieve the data. Thank so much! -John Q

  81. Nice advice! I had tried to use diskpart but I didn’t realize that I needed to ‘clean’ it first. Thanks a ton!

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  88. Thank a lot for helping me to delete GPT partition on my hard disk. Your site is more interesting and admirable to help people in the field of Computer Sciences. Thank again!

  91. Thank you very much. I could not figure this out until I stumbled across your posting. You saved me a lot of headaches.

  93. Thanks! I LOVE YOU! I swear, I’ve tried the most complicated solutions and downloaded a helluva lotta free trial software to try to fix this wretched Ext HD of mine for since Nov. last year. This got it fixed in a jiffy.
    Thanks, Paul! Cheers to a year since this post was erm… posted 🙂

  94. Thank you all, this post is one year old now, and I’m really happy that it helped many people and it keeps helping more people.

    It’s my pleasure to share it :).

  101. wow so glad i found this.your the man!!!thought i was gonna have to pitch it…but this worked so good :D..

  104. Thanks. I feel such sharing of knowledge is one of the feature of the eutopian socialistic society where knowledge is for everyone and is for free. Internet has done a great job and people like you are are serving a great cause without any greed.

  111. Thank you so much for the info, it worked for me. I was going nuts thinking that power supply was not sufficient.

  112. Many thanks for this info. Nailed the problem in no time where before, the MS Help just led me round in circles.

  115. I consider you to be a Great consultant instead MicroSoft. Thanks a lot. Your advise saves lots of time for me. Good job.

  117. Since you are going to lose all the data, why not do a Low Level Format. Always works for me and quick too as long as you don’t use the full option and do the who;e disk.

  118. Thanks alot, I had this external WD disk lying around which my friend(who uses a Mac) had been using. Since Macs want to do everything different I could not get the disk clean! Always this 200mb partition in the way. Your article fixed the problem in 30s, thanks alot!

  119. armshead: Since you are going to lose all the data, why not do a Low Level Format. Always works for me and quick too as long as you don’t use the full option and do the who;e disk.

    Low Level Format is not good hard drive, needs the utility tool from the disk manufacturer, and it’s slow too …

    remember: “Low level format is always of LAST RESORT when you encounter HDD problems.”

  120. The so called Low Level Format routine offered on manufacturers support disks is a perfectly acceptable method of returning a disk to its factory state. There is nothing sinister, “bad” or “last resort” about it. The Maxtor program which I used to use
    offers an option of “first 300Mb and last 100Mb only” This takes hardly any time at all.
    LLF is routinely used by sellers of second hand disks.
    The method I always use now uses Paragon Partition Manager Pro and take less than 2 minutes from start to finish, and will work on any disk whatever the format.
    Right click on the GPT disk in the list and select “view/edit sectors”
    Highlight the first byte and hold down the zero key. The program will zip through the first two blocks in seconds, Click save. Close the program. Re-open it and you have a blank disk.
    This is my “first resort”. I’m sorry if it offends Paul Gu but a thread which has attracted 120 posts obviously has plenty of people looking for a simple answer.

    <

  121. Not at all Armshead, and thanks for sharing your opinion, and it’s good to know this alternative. IMO, LLF is used when the hard disk encounters hardware issue, and LLF does a lot more than DiskPart. DiskPart can still be considered as HLF and it just does the job at this point.

  122. Thanks for the awesome tip! Luckily I found your advice before I tried any other way of getting my HDD back to normal.

  123. Thanks so much for these instructions!! Cleared my GPT partition that I did not want anymore perfectly as described. Looked all over for instructions that could work in XP Home or XP Pro and this was the best I could find! Thanks!!

  125. Pingback: How do I remove a GPT Protective Partition from a hard drive? - Technology Questions

  127. thank you saved me pulling out my hair as an external usb drive previously used on a Mac wouldnt allow me to save a recovery file from Acronis that could be accessed by the recovery media. All down to a mac partition left over which remained after formating

  132. brother, you saved me! I didn’t know what to do about this issue and you DEFINITELY helped me out! God bless!

  134. I use command, but could not see the partition (i know it is there from Disk management), but could not see from dos command

  135. haiying: I use command, but could not see the partition (i know it is there from Disk management), but could not see from dos command

    ‘list disk’ is to list disks, ‘list partition’ is to list partitions, which command did you use?

  147. Mike: How do i back-up my files if i can’t acess my GPT hard drive under XP?

    Back up files on the system where you get GPT partition…

    Under XP, diskpart and initialize it, then hook the drive back to “GPT” system to copy files back…

  157. I used my LACIE 500GB external HDD in my iMac but unable to use it on my XP Pc.its showing GPT Protective Partition in disk management.

    as your suggested method if i run the DISK PART tool and initialize it via “clean” command then does it gonna format my external hdd???

    I want to keep all the content stoed in the hdd and use the external HDD in xp – thats my ultimate goal..

    Would appreciate your kind suggestion regarding this issue.

    Thanks in advance

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  159. Ony: I used my LACIE 500GB external HDD in my iMac but unable to use it on my XP Pc.its showing GPT Protective Partition in disk management.as your suggested method if i run the DISK PART tool and initialize it via “clean” command then does it gonna format my external hdd???I want to keep all the content stoed in the hdd and use the external HDD in xp – thats my ultimate goal..Would appreciate your kind suggestion regarding this issue.Thanks in advance

    See my comment #148, or you might live with GPT partition.

  160. Perfect thanks Paul!
    Tried to connect external Hitachi Deskstar 320 Gb to Lenovo T60 via usb. Good tip!

  161. thanks a lot , i’m realy stuck with this gpt format…thanks once agin for this usefull comm.

  162. Just spent 30 minutes holding for Seagate and found your site while listening to their awful musak. Whiped out the GPT partition per your instructions while their tech guy was giving me directions on where to send the drive back for repair. Thanks much! –RH

  163. Like everyone before has said, this was very valublue information and saved a hard drive for me. Thank you for taking the time to post this information!

  169. Even though I’m already the 170th person to tell you this, I still think its worth sharing with you that this is one hell of a tip!

    Finally “opened” my external hard disc…

    Thanks a lot!

  172. My removable usb drive all of a sudden became write protected…

    Looked for days for a way to remove the protection…. NADDA.

    Until i found this info…. moved the drive to an XP system and was able to recover the drive in under 2 hours!!!

    THANX A MILLION!

  173. Sweet! I too like the rest of the comments haven’t heard of diskpart. Now I can be cool like you! This was the number 2 Google search for me but the first one I tried! Took all of 20 seconds to bring the drive back to reality!

  174. Thanks a Million!

    What did we do before the internets!

    My problem was that I had a drive that was previously used for Mac Time Machine so it came up as GPT Protectve Partiition.

    Your solution fixed it in seconds so once again thankyou.

  181. This Blog Tip was first found in my Google
    search…and for good reason; It’s answered
    many, many prayers…

    Keep up the great advice,

    Thank-You,
    Darryl

  186. Hi, your method by far is the best and least complicated ; without installing any software.

    I bought a hard disk media player and was formated by vendor with Vista…..and got this GPT problem which was unable to access via XP.

    Media Player instruction needed the HD to be reformated to FAT32…. and was unable to access the HD until i got to see your instruction.

    Thanks a million !!!

  188. Hi Paul, i’ve just bought a hard disk from a pal, and it was formatted in GPT. Added in google “can’t format sata disk gpt protective partition” y fall into your site. Simple incredible, in just 30 seconds. Now my HD is being formatted to NTFS while i’m writing this text. Thanks Forever!

  190. Paul,

    Thanks for this tip. I encountered a GPT protected issue when I tried to use my 80gb USB drive with my mac. After the lock, I couldn’t get it to do any thing.

    Your tip/technique, saved me from literally tossing out the hard drive, and chalking it up to an ID-10-T error.

    Thank you for this!

  192. Brilliant!! Solved our problem in less than 30 seconds … thank you sooooo much!

  195. all 195 thnx’s i think r enough!!!one more from me…great help…u saved me a lot of headache

  197. Thanks a Million “knowledge is power” after reading this it was so easy…thanksamillion

  199. HI.. Paul

    I have to say Thank you toooooooo ^^

    You are the man.

    Thank you again…. ^^

  203. it’s 145am here in florida, i have to be at work at 830 in the morning, and I’ve been trying to get my computer to read this Simpletech external drive for HOURS… then i come across this page, and your solution fixes the problem in UNDER 5 MINS. All i can say is, many many thanks..

  206. Thank you. Not even the tech help at Aluraket could help me figure out why I couldn’t use the harddrive and it is theirs.

  215. Probably no surprises what I’m going to say by now, but thanks so much for the clear, easy instructions! Saved me a lot of headaches 🙂

  216. Was About to follow your instructions but before I did I thought I would give my XP install disk a try. My way works as well delete the partition with Windows install. Then just exit install. It changes the partition type to GP then the partition can be deleted with any partition tool. With this method no need to back up whole drive on a multi partition disk

  217. Paul Dewhurst: Was About to follow your instructions but before I did I thought I would give my XP install disk a try. My way works as well delete the partition with Windows install. Then just exit install. It changes the partition type to GP then the partition can be deleted with any partition tool. With this method no need to back up whole drive on a multi partition disk

    This is great ~~ thanks for sharing the tips… 😀

  218. Thank you very much. Your clear and simple directions saved me a lot of hours of aggrevation. Thank You.

  219. Wow! simple yet very effective. this is just what need.
    I was about to give up… i could have been one of the I.D. 10 Tees!

    among the tipsters yours was the easiest to follow!

    Thanks Paul Gu!

  224. Great stuff ! thanks so much for the info; was really struggling with that GPT drive; now it’s all sorted

    cheers 🙂

  225. Gold. Liquid gold. These instructions are tremendously clear. I wish you had written the rest of the internet.

  226. i recently bought a used external hard drive(from a friend using a mac). my pc reads the hard drive but when i used disk management, it says (Healthy GPT Protective Partition). How do i erase the data(if there’s any) without losing my data from my pc??? thx..

  227. e89: i recently bought a used external hard drive(from a friend using a mac). my pc reads the hard drive but when i used disk management, it says (Healthy GPT Protective Partition). How do i erase the data(if there’s any) without losing my data from my pc??? thx..

    Please see comment No. 126, or back up your data in the driver first, then fix it and copy back all data to it.

  228. Pingback: How to convert and reformat a Mac hard drive to Windows | PC Help Journal

  229. I had never seen this type of partition before. Thank you for the extremely clear and accurate advice! Luckily for me this post came up first in my search, so next to no time lost here. Regards!

  230. I’ve had over 25 years in IT, most of the diddling with DOS, Windows and Mac OS. I had not hear of this utility. Fabulous. Really helpful.

  231. the procedure worked perfectly! two 750 GB drives converted from Mac to XP. Yet another RAID array is formed. Thanks a bunch. Cheers!

  233. Thanks for the tip. I had never heard of DiskPart prior to this and I’m sure glad you could point me in the right direction.

  239. I was having a hard time with this WD passport HD. It was giving me GPT protective partition in the disk management in window xp. Everything seens to load fine but it doesnt show in my computer. Thanks to your post, I was able to reformat the hard disk. Thanks again!

  244. Hi, I have the same trouble after plugging my Toshiba MK1652GSX USB device to a Mac but can not figure out how to backup my data first since it is not displaying at all in any computer…any suggestions?

  246. Thanks for your reply, Paul. The thing is it was NOT recognized by that Mac and since then, no PC is recognizing it either…

  247. Thank you very much. You gave very clear direction and it worked exactly as expected. I appreciate you taking the time to post this fix.

  248. The fact that there are already 12 people who have found this useful this month (a post created january 2008) just goes to show how important this feat is….many thanks

    Kundai

  255. thanks. i’m a pc guy teaching in a mac environment. i just used this on one drive, i have about 8 more to do so i can use them at home and work.

  260. Hello there,
    I have a problem with my WD external drive, and for some reason, it has this previously unheard of partiton. It prevents me from accessing it in My Computer. I Want/Really need the data on there. Any way this could happen?

  268. Блог очень качественный. Награду бы Вам за него или почетный орден. 🙂

  271. You are my hero!
    Thanks.
    Don’t know how I got my HDD became GPT yet, but anyway I am very happy to rescue my drive in so simple steps.
    Qing

  275. Thank you so much my boss had trouble doing this, so i did it found this and fixed it in about 30 secs! Thank you!!

  281. damn, you’re good. just solve my problem with this.
    i am servicing a client with this problem right now and i can’t go to disk mgmt properties because of this GPT thing.

    my warm appreciation for this article. best regards

  283. Hi, Paul. I’ve got a Vista platform computer – I’ve tried to apply your directions, but it won’t work as it keeps asking me for a disk number. Any ideas on how to solve this for Vista?

    Thanks in anticipation,

  289. THANK YOU!!!!!
    Quickest fix ever, and saved me a 100km round trip to the place of purchase (they said I had to bring it back in!) 🙂

  293. Thanks
    Your instruction was very useful, I format my 500 GB seagate external disk in windows vista and when I went to my office, then my windows XP PC recognize the disk, but I can see it. The disk management tool showed me “GPT label”.
    have a nice weekend
    Raul

  294. Amazing! I purchased an Iomega 2x500mb=1TB UltraMax Desktop Hard Drive on eBay. When I got it, it powered up but my computer wouldn’t assign it a drive. After stumbling around on techie sites with too advanced (for me)directions I found this blog and IT FIXED MY PROBLEM, It now has a drive letter and is formatted correctly and WORKS. Thank you sooooo much!!!

  295. Thanks so much. I had apparently formatted by external hard drive as GPT with my Mac and couldn’t figure out why my PC wouldn’t recognize it. This solved the problem.

  301. I wish I could join you guys but my computer is still screwed. I got this error when trying to reformat, now my hard drive is completely toasted. I’m using Hirens Boot CD v10 and have tried everything. Reseting MBR and sector0, checked disk for errors, etc.

    I use the cd bootable mini XP and enter dos. Im able to start diskpart and select and clean the disk. When i return to disk management the wizard pops up and wants me to initialize/convert. I do this but the disk still says “unknown” and to check the system log.

    Someone PLEEEASE help me!

  311. Dear Friend, I will thank you VERY MUCH indeed.
    you solve my problem in a few lines!!!!!

    I wish to you all the best in this life.

    Thank you

  315. hi thx man for big info
    but i have problem in my usb sony 250 gb flash Drive
    windows 7 cant see it and i cant do the steps on my usb

    <>

  318. Thanks for the invaluable tip.

    I use macdrive and it locks up the disc after your done with the drive by preventing anything from changing it. I was unable to reinitialize the disk with macdrive then create a MBR through vista disk managment because windows didn’t have the permission to change the format of the disk.

    Saved my a55 a lot of support emails to macdrive, who are quite helpless with windows administration.

  324. Hmm i did not get this to work… are there any special command for clean? like >clean disk:0< ?
    When i type \"list disk\" i get DISK, PARTITION and VOLUME. If i type \"list disk\" again i get the disks up, i then \"select:0\" i get a long list of options, but the \"clean\" part i cant get to work..HELP!!

  328. Thanks Paul. I was scratching my head on this one, but your solution solved my problem.

    Cheers.

  329. Thanks Paul , wiped clean from GPT to like brand new unallocated , now initialized & formatted back to ntfs
    successful !!!! now ready to be placed in laptop for windows 7 & XP dual boot at last !!
    Happy Xmas Paul Take Care & thankyou for this posting.

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  333. Just a quick note to say you are, in a word, GREAT!!! So much research, misinformation, etc. Found your article and nailed it in less than one minute. You are the best, dude – keep it up.

    thx,

    jim

  334. Thank you! I just purchased 2 new hard drives and they were protected and i had no idea how to fix that. I hope you have a wonderful Holiday Season, you deserve it.

  338. lol 338th happy diskparter, shame you cant charge for this advice 🙂 think I vaguely recall using this in dos, years ago but thanks for great post!

  339. Thanks! So my years, and still a great help! I had to ‘google’ to get here, but it was worth a million!

  340. The nice thing about good solutions is that they work over and over. Yours was a GOOD solution. Thanks

  341. Thanks a lot for the info. Unbelievable that this isn’t possible with the standard disk management panel.

  342. Cool stuff, you saved me,The Head of Finance bought a 500GB in the US and i had no idea that there was even a GPT protective patition, You a Legend

  343. Thanks a lot, that took care of it. Very easy when compared to some other sites requiring you to download utilities.

    WORKS PERFECT!

  345. just did what you said then created a logical drive
    then poof! problem solved!

    thanks!

  346. Thanks for the refresher! I diskpart quite awhile ago, but haven’t needed it in awhile. You helped me “remember” the command.

  347. Great post, 7 years in IT and the first time i encountered a gpt. concise, to the point and i learned something new!

  349. I like to thank you for this post. I almost gave up on the idea of converting this WD “My Passport Studio” 500GB drive GPT formatted, my client purchased. I must admit there are of quirky ideas on how to do the conversion, but it all comes down to DOS. DOS has been and will remain the work horse of the computer world.

    Thanks Again

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  353. Many thanks to you for sharing your knowledge with all of us. I bought my 500Gb Seagate Sata drive from an individual through craigslist and it was GPT Protected, he has yet to get back with me on how to clear this matter up. Thanks to you I have not lost my money nor my space. God Bless

  357. Another happy man! New Free Agent drive was driving me nuts … and now – like all the others above… I’m in business!

  359. You’re a life saver!!!! I had an external drive that had been formatted on a Mac that I then reformatted under Windows 7 but Windows XP refused to see it. Disk Management would see it but wouldn’t let me do anything with it but your page has solved all those problems in one go! Fabulous!!!!! Thanks!!!!!!

  363. Hi Paul!
    I just bought a 250 gb hard drive,and i can not install vista on it! It says”the selected file is of the GPT partition style”.Any idea how can i fix this? Thanks!

  368. Had used diskpart in the past, but was unfamiliar with the ‘clean’ command. Thanks for posting this advice–it saved what little hair I have remaining!

  369. Dude, my friend plugged my WD external hard drive into his mac, which wouldnt recognise it, and now my windows won’t recognise it. How do I clean the disk without deleting all the data? I’m a dummy with computers so if you could put it in as simple a layman’s terms as possible (ie, step by step!!) I would be eternally grateful. I desperately don’t want to lose all the data on the hard drive as it’s all i’ve got. Thanks in advance for any advice you could give me.

  370. Desperate: Dude, my friend plugged my WD external hard drive into his mac, which wouldnt recognise it, and now my windows won’t recognise it. How do I clean the disk without deleting all the data? I’m a dummy with computers so if you could put it in as simple a layman’s terms as possible (ie, step by step!!) I would be eternally grateful. I desperately don’t want to lose all the data on the hard drive as it’s all i’ve got. Thanks in advance for any advice you could give me.

    You need to get the HD back to the system where you you put your data, such as Vista, WIndows 7, or Linux… backup all your data to the local disk. Then you can use the instruction above to re-format the disk if you need to.

  371. Thanks for that, but I don’t understand how I can back it up to the local disk when my computer can’t see it? Any ideas? THANKS!

  372. Desperate: Thanks for that, but I don’t understand how I can back it up to the local disk when my computer can’t see it? Any ideas? THANKS!

    I’m even confused now, where did you put the data in the first place? Are you sure you have data on the disk? what type of data? what system you have used before to put these data?

  374. FINALLY!!!! The information I needed. Thank you for this post. My “freed” external drive is happily formatting away.

  376. Holy oh sweet lord oh wow…

    Like all the rest here I just want to say thank you, it’s still amazing to me how hard some things can be.

  377. SWEET JESUS DAY LORD IN THE MORNING!!!!! I’ve got 4 1TB drives and this one has been giving me a TIME for a week! Like so many on here I got poor info time after time on the net and then stumbled on this! Man thanks and then some!!!!!!!! Good Day from NC!

  378. I did this. Seemed to work but now the drive in question shows as “Unallocated” and when I right click I do not get a format option or a delete partition option. Any ideas?

  379. @ Jamie – You need to create a new partition.

    I have a question: when i do the list disk command only my primary disk is shown. I have 4 disks connected to my PC and none of them show up. I did a RESCAN and still only one disk. grrr.. oh well ill just have to wait untill i get back home to me mac 🙂 Oh and it was the atvUSBcreator that created this partition in the first place.

  381. Thank you so much! So simple and clear. 4 steps and you are done. We need more people like you online!!

  387. Dang! This post has been actively commented for over 2 years! You rock dude! Thanks for the post. You saved me the aggravation. Should be #1 on Google!

  388. Pingback: Como borrar un disco con GPT "Protective Partition" | TecnologiaNow

  392. Unfortunately diskpart does not show removable memory (USB memory stick) as a drive so will not allow you to clear GPT on these devices.

    As a note, it was a Mac using GUID that created the GPT partition table. If you set the Mac to use MBR rather than GPT it avoids the problem and you can read the key on a Windows XP machine. This was the solution in my particular case.

    Cheers.

  393. Fred: Unfortunately diskpart does not show removable memory (USB memory stick) as a drive so will not allow you to clear GPT on these devices.As a note, it was a Mac using GUID that created the GPT partition table.If you set the Mac to use MBR rather than GPT it avoids the problem and you can read the key on a Windows XP machine.This was the solution in my particular case.Cheers.

    Thanks for sharing 🙂

  398. Thanks from Japan! It worked.

    Is it possible to read files of “GPT Protective Partition”? Please let us know about it.

    Best regards!!

    CHak

  399. Thanks from Japan! It worked.

    Is it possible to read files of \”GPT Protective Partition\”? Please let us know about it.

    Best regards!!

    CHak

  400. Thanks from Japan! It worked.Is it possible to read files of \”GPT Protective Partition\”? Please let us know about it.Best regards!!CHak

    You need to connect the disk to system which supports the GPT drive, such as Windows Vista, Windows 7, and MAC…

  401. Pingback: Diskpart.exe – Fitur Terlupakan

  403. This was a big help I am glad that I wasn’t the only one who was breaking his head trying to figure this one out. You were a big help thnx.

  405. WOW, you are THE MAN!! I went round and round with my western digital external drive in Windows XP and couldn’t find a solution, until a week later, when I ran across your fix. Thanks a MILLION!! This worked like a charm!

  407. Hello. I have a GPT-formatted slave HDD. My XP pro will not detect it, nor will it be accessible in the disk list in diskpart. Any advice on that? thanks in advance.

  408. You are a bloody genius,I spent weeks trying to figure this out.Thanks so much.I wonder why disk manufacturers won’t add this trouble shooting.You would think they would because it’s to their benefit.

  409. Very useful, but i have never used the command line before so I am a little weary of using the script here. Do i just type in
    select disk x
    then
    clear disk x ?

    Will that clear whats on the actual computer or just on the ext hdd? Because the latter is all I want! Please reply asap, I need to get this done by tomorrow and noone else on the internet seems to be as idiotic or as cautious as me!
    Thanks in advance

  410. It will only clear that HDD. For example, typing “select disk D” and then “Clean disk” will only clean drive D, if you have a disk there.

  414. Thanks! This helped me a lot. It was not obvious to use the clean command. I tried to delete the GPT but it did not work. But after reading your article it was very simple to fix it.

  419. WOW, look at all the well deserved comments. Well, like so many others, I found a lot of bad information, mostly people guessing at ways to do it, but DiskPart took all of about 30 seconds. My favorite part is the way it doesn’t ask “Are you sure?”, god help the poor soul that “cleans” his or her boot partition by accident. LOL A true admin tool if ever there was one. Thank you!!! Rick

  420. Wow, Thanks.

    Also great to see so many thank yous starting in Jan 2008 and one just posted hours before mine. This is what the web is about and the amount of value you can provide to so many.

    also, for any later google searches: HP simplesave disable hpt protective status.

  422. I’m hoping someone can help me out with my issue. I have an old WD153AA hard drive that came out of a Windows 98 computer. It’s a 15gig…and I wanted to just do a quick transfer of my old data…without having to burn it all to cd’s. Bought an enclosure…and Vista recognizes the drive as a storage device..and gives me the “safely remove hardware” option. However..the drive does not show up in my list of drives in Explorer. In Admin Tools..it shows up..but no drive letter is assigned..and it won’t allow me to edit the drive…or assign a letter to it. Is it possible that XP will recognize the drive..in order for me to get my data off of it? I don’t care about the drive…would just like to retrieve the data. It was a bootable drive in the original computer…and the jumper has been changed to make it a slave. Anyone that can help with this?
    Please email to fleabear1028@yahoo.com if you have any advise. Thanks.

  423. I should add that I have a Seagate 1TB external that I have no issues with. A friend was also looking to get his data off his old computer that recently had the motherboard go down. As luck would have it..his drive is a Western Digital also. I had the same problem with his drive…so I’m wondering if it is a Western Digital issue…or something to do with the enclosure not working correctly.
    Thanks.

  428. When I type in Diskpart, it only shows the primary drive. which is listed as 0. I thought am supposed to see both drives. All I see is the primary drive. This thing is really bothering me. Its a 500GB WD drive. I want to run installations for some lessons. Thanks.

  429. I believe deleting the GPT Protective partition is about choice. I have both a mac and a pc and i did format my 500gb lg external hard drive into 3 partions-mac os x(journalled), fat 32, and NTSF . All partitions were done on the mac but the NTSF(origally a fat 32 vol from the mac) was reformatted on my pc to ntsf. So everything works fine since my pc runs windows 7(not xp). The GPT partition that shows up on my pc is just 200mb, so no worries; the idea is to be able to use my ext hard disk on both the mac and pc?
    what would you advise Paul?
    thanks
    Dean

  431. Awesome, Thanks. Mac OS X left my external hard disk in GPT and this saved my day! Thanks!!!

  433. thanx a ton, seriously i thought i messed up with the flash drive , finally found this , great relief, once again thanx

  434. Perfect! Exactly the trick I needed to get my new iomega USB drive reformatted to work on XP. Thanks so much!

  435. Hi
    Thanx, Lots of Thanx my friend
    it was very helpful !

    good luck and god bless you
    Best Regards

  438. Pingback: phoenixdigital.com » Blog Archive » Forcefully Delete a Partition in Windows

  443. It’s so easy when you know how – thanks, Paul for knowing how, and more thanks for taking the trouble to publish it – you’re a real star.
    I was lucky as I had bought a HDD that I found was GPT protected, so I googled for a solution and found this spot straight away – it was almost at the top of the google search, which perhaps reflects the poularity of the site? A fix, freely given, that took under a minute to complete – and otherwise I could have spent hours searching. Brilliant!

  446. To get any help for any command in MS-DOS use “help” and then “(command) /? example: ping /? ”
    Be carefull with the commands you don’t know and when you start learning more about computer you should constantly back-up your data with a free software like Dmailer http://www.dmailer.com/dmailer-backup.html just to get you outside any problems

  449. Thanks so much. I have never come across this type of partition before, but thanks to this post my hard drive was quickly fixed and in use.

  451. Thanks a lot. I was strugling with diskpart and disk management but you steps gave me exact instructions.

  453. What the hell? DiskPart? Are you serious? How did you ever find out about it? I’ve been fdisking and boot-sectoring HDDs since I was born in the DOS days but this is ridiculous. Btw I got the disk from eBay. I have no idea why so many disks are GPTed at all. Thanks.

  454. Kudos.
    Your instructions saved me a headache and a possible hangover. Thanks again.

  455. Will this erase everything on all disks (i.e. C: drive as well as the the external I’m trying to reformat)? Or did I just read it wrong?

  457. I have been hammering a way this thing for two days. I have tried every OS install that there is in order to get this thing formatted and partitioned. Even pulled out some old Dos disks from the 90s trying to Fdisk it. I was in the middle of using Lifeguard Diagnostic from Western Digital it was about half way threw adding zeros (already 3 hours in) when I came across this post. Damm your sweet , fixed in minutes. Your the Man.

  462. You sir Rock!

    I searched for a long time on Western Digital’s website trying to figure out how to remove one of there god damn 200MB protected partitions on my new 500GB external USB drive. Nothing… Absolutely no information on how to recover and remove that damn partition.

    Google search and bam! Your awesome advice. I also have never used DiskPart and have been playing with computers for the past 20 years.

    Sending good karma your way.

  464. I too have been looking for a way to remove the protected partition on a Western Digital Passort. What I’m wondering is if the solution you posted will work with XP Home, or does it have to be Professional?

  465. AWESOME. You completely simplified this process and saved me hours of further searching. I really appreciate this.

    TY,

    LM

  466. Hi Paul. It sounds like you’ve helped a lot of people out. I’m probably less techie than most so still having problems. I have bought an external hard drive with GPT Protection. When I type list disk as suggested I get a list containing my internal hard disk (c drive) and the new disk. Obviously I don’t want to wipe the C drive so how do I select the new drive only?
    Thanks

  467. I attempt to perform DiskPart on a USB Flash drive, however, when i type the command it show me the fixed disk only and it does not show the removable disk… my question to you, is there a way to delete the GPT Protective partition from a removable drive (USB Flash drive). your assistant in this matter is greatly appreciated… my e-mail is inclosed above.

    best regards,

  469. Hi!
    I have a very delicate problem.
    I installed my disk on win XP, backuped all our photos (wedding and baby …) on it. Wife plugged the drive into her MAC and now the disk is GPT protective and we cannot access the data.

    Please, is there any way to recover the data?
    I read comment #148, but we cannot access the disk from XP nor the MAC.

    Thanks for your help!

    Kristoffer

  470. Hi Kristoffer,

    Try to plug the disk into Windows Vista or Windows 7 to see if you can retrieve the data………….

  471. Adding to the many many thanks already! Worked within seconds. Thanks for saving me alot of wasted time.

  475. Hi all,

    I have the same problem as Kristoffer!
    I have tried to plug in today my external Seagate hard drive on to an mac laptop and it showed empty!!( I have to mention a haven’t backed up my data, unfortunately)
    I gor scared and then I tried to plug it back to my pc(windows xp). It doesn’t see it, only in computer management as a ‘healthy(gpt protective partition). Is there any chance to recover my data? I have only important data there, I would be devastated to loose it all).
    Do you think that plug it in to a pc with vista could let me see and retrieve my data?

    Many thanks!

    Ana

  476. Ana,

    Plug into any pc with vista or windows 7, and then backup all data on the disk first.

    Once you’re done the backup, then follow the instruction and delete the driver and format it in Windows XP. Now you will have non-gpt driver which can be used in both XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

  478. Bloody fantastic – thanks so much for posting that – solved my problem after 48hrs of going bananas!

  482. I used this on an external USB disk drive. However, I was using Vista running as a virtual machine in VWware on a Mac. When I entered the final ‘clean’ command, Windows instantly closed with a blue error screen. It reported closing down to avoid damage to Windows.

    This was a bit worrying at the time but when I restarted Vista (virtual machine) all was well. I went back into Vista’s Disk Management utility and the GPT protective partition had gone. Success, but others might like to know about the blue screen issue.

  483. I used this on an external USB disk drive. However, I was using Vista running as a virtual machine in VWware on a Mac. When I entered the final \’clean\’ command, Windows instantly closed with a blue error screen. It reported closing down to avoid damage to Windows.

    This was a bit worrying at the time but when I restarted Vista (virtual machine) all was well. I went back into Vista\’s Disk Management utility and the GPT protective partition had gone. Success, but others might like to know about the blue screen issue.

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  485. I follow the steps and work. 30 second’s a its done.
    Thanks for the help and information.

    Thank’s a lot

    ________________________________________

    Segui os passos conforme descritos e funcionou em 30 segundos.
    Muito Obrigado pela ajuda e informação.

    Muito Obrigado

    SurferX

  487. Plz explain to me via email( in lamens terms how to copy my files prior to formatting my external hard drive. Thank you so much for your assistance.

  491. SWEET! I was using the disk as a Time Machine for my mac, but needed it to be a external hard drive for my PC. This was the only way.

  495. Thanks for mentioning at the beginning of the of the post that this will wipe your drive and the main problem is actually that the drive is from a 64-Bit machine and just will not work in a 32-Bit Machine…. thanks!

  502. I’m glad this is near the top of the google search, clear and efficient instructions. You’re the man!

  504. Had a HDD with FreeBSD which had a GPT,
    wanted to install FreeBSD with ‘normal’ partition table -> error
    tried to override whole disk by creating one big partition (via a linux-system) -> fail
    tried to delete all and create an ntfs-partition (to delete it later) -> worked(?) but still gpt on the f***ing disk.
    read your tip -> all done!

    (your tip is the first hit when googling ‘remove gpt’, i should have tried that a few hours erlier…)

    thanks a lot, man! 🙂

  505. Thanks from me too! Had a USB drive that was used with digital TV and could not figure out how to wipe that clean to be used again with my XP.

    This cleared the problem, but I have to agree with one of the comments that the DiskPart is really scary! 😀

  513. I can see the USB drive under “Computer management/disk management” but when I do a “list disk” it doesn’t show up.
    Any ideea?

    Thx,
    Lorin

  516. Pingback: Dudii nyt sitä ollaan sit 1terasen ulkoi… « Joonan blogi

  517. Number 521 to state that this one article just saved me two USB drives that got screwed up somehow. Getting my head around the GPT (200Mb) was …….

    Anyway thank you for sharing this great tip.

  518. Pingback: Niet detecteerbare HDD - 9lives - Games Forum

  519. Another success. Great instructions. Bought a Mac only FreeAgent Go drive and am formating it for my Windows PC. Thanks.

  521. I echo what everyone else says and add my comment in the hope that it will help your page get to the top of the search listings for the solution to this particular problem.

    Too used to being able to do stuff in the GUI, I should have thought about using a command line tool long ago 🙂

  523. Like most stuff here. The example is wrong.
    Do I type:

    SELECT
    SELECT 2
    SELECT DISK:2 (the example)
    SELECT:2
    SELECT DISK2

  529. It definitely works getting rid of the GPT but still no answers on how to make the disk show back up under disk management. It shows up as “unallocated” on the bottom portion but nothing on top.

  535. Amazing, isn’t it…?

    How we can find the most effective of solutions in the smallest of places.

    Thank you. May there be more like you in this world 🙂

  536. Amazing, just amazing. I replaced my laptop hard drive with an SSD. now I have this 320GB hard drive sitting here. so i decided to use it to store movies so i can play it on my PS3 and XBOX 360. I tried formating it to fat32 using (swissknife, easus, partition magic etc) everything I tried would not show up on either of the systems. however it did show up on windows 7 but not windows XP. i was scratching my head FOREVER until…

    i stumbled on this website. gave it a quick go, formated to fat32 plugged it into ps3 and xbox360 and TAADAA! works perfectly.

    i guess the partitioning programs couldn’t do anything when its locked in GPT. well u know what? EFF GPT 4 LIFE.

    kudos to paul. = )

    thanks,

    andrew

  538. and the answer is exactly the same – fantastic –

    *starts installing on new ibis ssd

    Thankyou x

  546. Purchased a drive on ebay that had a 200mb GPT partition. Like all the others, I tried the usual partition solutions with no success. Fortunately I found your page.

    I followed your instructions and within seconds the GPT was gone. Thank you very much!!

  547. Hi Paul,

    you’re da bomb! 🙂
    Thank you very much for this great tip!

    Greetings from Germany,
    Ben

  553. I just want to say a big THANK YOU from Paris and have a wonderful new year ! You saved my Hard Drive Disk 🙂

  555. Pingback: General: Unrecognized HDD

  560. Thanks a ton,
    I got 500GB Mac formatted HDD and got really worried and almost about to return to the sender loosing $$, but u made it my day.

    read 100’s on Mac-Os, Softwares, Crackers and even read we cannot use Mac formatted disk in Windows.
    u broked their tounge.
    I am going to post ur link in all the links where i read

    Thanks alot expert.

  562. but i got only 465GB availabe from 500GB, any ways to get the remaining space ?

    This is normal, those space are reserved for disk partition and file information for the rest of space.

  563. Thank you SOOOOOOOO much, I have bought a couple of drives off CraigsList and sometimes you just don’t know what you are getting. But somewhere in the back of your mind you keep saying ‘there’s got to be an easy way’ and sure enough YOU got it.

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  573. >>but i got only 465GB availabe from 500GB, any ways to get the remaining space ?
    >This is normal, those space are reserved for disk partition and file information for the rest of space.

    Actually it’s how Windows (and Mac OSX 10.5 and earlier) reports. HDD manufacturer (and OSX 10.6) says 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes (1000x1000x1000) = “metric” GB but OS says 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024x1024x1024 or 2^30) = “binary” GB. So a “500GB” HDD is really 500/1.073741824 = 465. (There is a little bit of space reserved for partition and file information but not 7%!).

    Terabyte drives are now almost 10% over-reported, since a binary TB = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.

  574. Picked up a new Toshiba 500 GB external drive for cheap quite a while back and just found out it was for mac. Too late to return. Could not use on my xp nor w7 machines. Your advice cleaned gpt off the drive and allowed me to give it a drive letter and format it for use on my pc computers. Thanks for the advice and your help. I am moving files to it as I type. You have been bookmarked. Great job, thanks again!

  577. thanks, that worked perfectly!!
    was also wondering how to delete the GPT on a USB memory stick…

  578. whew!!!
    All cheers to this forum!

    I know it’s been years since but i’m also not that much of a tech warrior.
    Like everyone else…did everything to no avail until i saw this fix.

    Thanks a whole lot!

  579. Great! Add another “Thank you” to the list;-) Just the right solution. Worked from Windows 7

  586. i have to say thanks a lot i tried a few programs that did not work and this was a lot easier

  587. ugh. i cant pass the
    type “diskpart” part;

    it says…. “diskpart” is not recognised as an internal or external command….

    how?

  588. Thanks so much man i have a 2 tb drive that i installed Ubuntu on and it did a gpt style format

  592. This really worked for me!

    I cannot even start to thank you.
    I was quite lost before this information came toward me.
    Again, thank you so, so much!

    Regs,
    Finally

  594. Great posting, diskpart who would of thought it would be that easy! You learn and learn, but can never learn it all )

  595. Many thanks!
    I see that you posted your solution 3 years ago and it looks it helped many people beside me.

  597. !LEGEND!
    Worked 1st time. Thankyou for taking the time to help. Much appreciated.

  601. Pingback: Remove GPT Protective Partition « TekTipz

  602. Big Ole thanks for this. Been struggling with an external drive on my OSX for the last week.

  604. Man, YOU ARE THE ONE! Thanls for you USEFULL Help.

    It saved my life!

    THANKS A LOT

  605. Thanks Dan … You rock man … it worked first time around!

    I bow to your fearless awesomeness ……. 🙂

  608. Your posting is useful and helpful. Many of us will definitely assert that everything in your site is nice. Should you keep on posting helpful articles on your online site, often there is a higher possibility that lots of viewers will visit your web page.
    Land For Sale

  612. Great advice. It needs a couple extra steps, but you gave the most important procedure to clean my new Hitachi external drive.

  616. This is awesome! Thank you very much!

    I bought an external 250 GB SATA HD. I reformatted it using Windows 7. Alas, my office laptop with OS XP couldn’t show it. I just followed your suggestion above and it worked!

    How can I forget this blog and DiskPart? 😀

    Have a good one!

  619. Thanks for this awesome tip, I’ve never heard about the diskpart. Thank you! 🙂

  622. Pingback: 2tb hard disk problem - Digit Technology Discussion Forum

  623. Thanks alot for your post.

    I took out the 250GB HD from my macbook pro and wanted to use it on windows XP, and your post is the solution to remove the GPT protective partition.

  624. Hey! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my previous room mate! He always kept chatting about this. I will forward this article to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thank you for sharing!

  626. This helped me get access to a disk that was previously formatted for Mac. Thank you very much!!!

  630. Amazing, i just follow the instructions n finally i did it. great! thanks so much for your sharing.

  632. Thank you very much for saving my sanity!!!
    This should be published in every manual…

    All the best!

  635. THANK YOU!
    I wasted so many hours with a low level format for nothing…

    This is a true solution!

  642. Thanks so much! – as others have said quick, easy, fast.
    Too much bs advice on the net…this is not!

  646. Awesome how to, is there anything higher than A+?, I had a 500 GB drive stuck with GUID format and this fixed it and got rid of it. thank you so much, now it is sitting in laptop doing it’s job, Thanks to you.

  648. Brilliant…. Very much appreciated. Now I just need to figure out how to format the disk in standard FAT32…. Cheers.

  652. You have literally years worth of thanks on this page. I will add mine to that, you have saved my computer 🙂

  654. Yo The Man…I used to teach DOS at San Diego City College back in the day. Go figure I would forget such a important command now 25 years later.

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  657. thanx heaps – too easy to delete a ‘gpt protective partition’ on my usb drive.

    to marshall ( 59 ) above, just use windows disk management to format as a ntfs partition, then download ‘guiformat.exe’ to reformat as fat32.

  658. After loking at unworkable (and questionable solutions on the ‘net this simply works. Thanks you so much.

    Cheers,

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  662. This had me stumped too. The drive was in a Linux NAS, then went into a Win7 machine where it worked fine. Then I wanted to use it in an XP machine and that’s when I found out it it had this mysterious GPT protected partition and I couldn’t access it or do anything with it.

    This was such a simple solution.

    Thanks!

  665. Thank you SO much!!! Been searching the internet for hours!! Mom gave me her old WD Passport external drive and all of the options were greyed out in Disk Manager, couldn’t format or assign a drive letter or anything, only “help” was listed – which was no help at all. It showed the drive as “GPT Protective Partition.” Thought I was going to have to get rid of the drive and then found your post! Thank you so much!!!! (You’d think the WD folks would post this on their site.)

  666. Thanks !!!!!!, Great work, I m working in IT sector for 15 yrs but never heard of diskpart—– great job

  670. Thanks a lot. I did exactly like you told here and ererything is okay now. I could reset my Sata HD. THANKS!

  672. Stumbled here after a google search and wanted to thank you immensely for the great and easy tutorial. Helped me convert 3 HD to NTFS and make use of them.
    Great job! Thanks again.

  673. Thanks alot. I thought to buy new one. It saves me 125 bucks. …. My Harddisk is working again..

    Thank you very much

  674. You Are A STAR!!!

    Going on for 5 Years and your ADVICE is still the hottest I have ever needed to use.

    Live Long and Prosper!

    Regards
    Gavin

  676. Thanks wery much! Ďakujem, trapi som sa s diskom 2 dnik, kým som objavil tento návod. Ďakujem!

  677. What can i do if I wanted to install Windows 7,I erased the partition,then I realised it’s a GPT partition/ Now I can’t install anything….

  678. What can i do if I wanted to install Windows 7,I erased the partition,then I realised it’s a GPT partition/Now I can’t install anything….

    If you erased the partition, then you should not have GPT partition, I believe you didn’t erase it.

  684. This may be an old thread but it solved my problem. New drive is now formatting and seen in Explorer. Thank you.

  691. I pulled out a lot of hair until I found your words of wisdom.

    Thank you very much.

    Regards

    Chris

  692. Thanks
    I really thanks you
    I’m so sad about this problem cause i’m using windows 7 and datas from my friend was on windows XP
    May God Bless You….
    Thanks

  694. Ive been dealing with this GPT protective crap for many hours even the guy at Seagate was completely useless. Thank you so much for this post. If only I had looked it up at 9 this morning.

  696. Hi,

    I have connected an external USB HDD, WD My Book, but the Device Manager cannot seen it.

    I tried also with DiskPart, ‘list disk’, without succesful – is not listed.

    I verified on Device Manager and the driver is OK:
    – under Disk drives: WD My Book USB Drive is display
    – under WD Drives Management devices, WD SES device is display well

    Also the WD Drive Manager, WD DataLifeguard Diagnostic, Hard Disk Sentinel that USB HDD, only the Windows don’t assign the drive letters 🙁

    Do you have any idea how I can make it to work?

    Thanks a lot

  697. Amazing how many people are still getting help from this article after all this time. Many thanks!

  699. Great! Thank you for publishing this tutorial. Helped me rescue a 500GB iOmega USB hard-drive.

  700. I ran Clean command , its giving below errow;

    The selected disk is neccessary to the operation of your computer, and may not
    be cleaned.

    Please help me ….

  702. if the disk already contains data if the data will be lost?

    Yes, all data will be lost, copy data to another disk/usb drive before you do this.

  703. hi
    if any one lose data of this stupid gpt resin don’t worrie.
    just do one thing first change disk format with Paul Gu method.
    then use icare data recovery software with partition recovery option.
    i hope u will get all data back.
    i solved my problem after one month search with this method.
    i get back my data almost 100%.
    try it
    thanks.

  704. I ran Clean command , its giving below errow;The selected disk is neccessary to the operation of your computer, and may notbe cleaned.Please help me ….

    You need to “select” another disk, you cant clean your c: drive because windows would stop working? which I am guessing your doing wrong.

    Thanks Paul Gu, you just saved me a headache.

  710. Thanks a bunch! This is by far the fastest/easiest way to remove the GPT partition. Thank you thank you thanks!

  716. Thanks so much! Trying to salvage an older computer for church and this helped me out.

  724. It was a shock to see Windows Vista Disk Mgmt couldn’t do anything (no options) with the disk. Still great advice. Many thanks.

  731. omg awesome, it worked like magic, I send you my gratefull thanks for this most excellent fix

  733. What a fantastic & amazing article which was published 06Jan2008!!!! Well done Paul.

  735. Cheers mate, worked for me.
    Problem was formatted portable disk in Win 7 for NTFS file system. Plug it to XP and disk didn’t mount.
    Anyway cheers for the clear instruction!

  737. Brilliant….still useful 4 years later because of the Mrs with her pesky Mac…..grrrrrr

  738. This is just simply brilliant. You save me from many days of trying to resolve this. You ROCK.

  739. Hi!
    Words are not enough to thank you…in fact, one of fake service engineers told that my disk is useless and he asked for less than one dollar..amazingly you helped me save a lot of hard earned money.

  743. U are great, this helps me to solve my External USB drive from wiping Mac HFS+ type (became GPT) and unable to re-create partition on XP (found no way to workaround).

    Thank you so much ^_^

  744. Thank you SO much! This was driving me crazy! Win7 could see the drive but XP couldn’t. Now they both can!

    I wish there was a way to do this non-destructively, but at least this works.

  746. Thank you so much, I have been down a dozen routes – all of them ineffective – You are a True Professional ! You have solved my problem ! Thanks Again.

  750. Thanks, you help me formatted my wrong formatted hd from linux, its safe me a lot of time.but i still feel sorry for my lost files (even windows give in first)

    anyway, a lot of thanks from me.

  752. Just goes to PROVE – KNOWLEDGE is POWERFUL. If ALL of us with positive comments here paid you just 10% of the wasted time and money spent on crap ‘solutions’ I suspect you would have a nice little sum to ‘play’ with. AND it goes on and on and on….obviously this is a BIG issue and so few ‘techs’ know how to deal with it?

    You are a true Internet ‘freedom fighter’…step up and get your www MEDAL.

    THANKS 🙂

  753. Thank you so much. I agree with the above post, I am surprised how many ‘techies’ have no idea.
    I lent my external HD to a friend who uses an Apple Mac. Once he finished with it,formatted it from his PC. This is when my problems started. I use Windows and now it works on windows PC.

  754. It worked. Thank you so muck!
    Nó chạy tốt. Cảm ơn bạn rất nhiều! (Vietnamese – Tiếng Việt)

  756. Thank you so so so much. I believe you already have great and wonderful comments. Though i did not spent much time looking the solution to my problem, you have save so much of my time figuring it out. I wish God will bless you with whatever you want in life be it love, wealth and health. Cheers man. You are truly a life saver.

  758. When I do it, it doesn’t say initialize disc? anyhelp out there. It is a 320 gig toshiba hdd out of a 6 month old laptop.stuck in that gtp format. want to wipe it and empty it.

  763. Thank you Paul thought i lost the external hard drive, the easy instruction saved me a lot of money. thanks again

  764. Thanks alot ! i’ve searched the solution for days, now found this ! Aprechiate your work ! thanks again !

  765. You are the MAN! worked perfectly and lucky I found this within minutes because from user’s comment, it took some of them days and weeks to figure this out.

  769. Paul, I add my sincere thanks. Like many others, I found numerous other dead ends before discovering your clear and simple solution.

  775. Thank you very muchhhhhhhhhhh! Love you man! 🙂 sorry I’m just happy after looking for the right method for 4 days!

  785. Tnx! You are a Mage!

    This is the fastest solution for all LIDL (GE) distributed MEDION AKOYA half-PC to reorganize. You save to we a very disgousting IT-Service pay-2-ground-sucking.

    Many tanks!
    Johny Eastern

  786. Many thanks. It was a great help in replacing the crap that Windows 8 is, with Win7.

  787. Wow, thanks for this, I could not figure out why WIn7 would not install after I removed 8 from a brand new HP laptop. Too bad you can’t just convert the GPT partition only, I wanted to keep the recovery partitions shipped with the drive. Oh well, not possible, nuked the other partitions and converted the HD to MBR. Works fine now 🙂

  789. I want to remove preloaded windows 8 in my HP laptop.
    Great. Works for me. Thank a lot.

  791. Screwed up my Acomdata USB drive by formatting with windows 8… Couldn’t read / format it with XP until I found this…
    Forgot most of the DOS commands…

    Two thumbs and two big toes up!
    Thanks…

  794. thanks very much! this allows me to use my 1Tb USB3 drive which I formatted with Ubuntu as NTFS (??)

  797. Not the first to say this but, thanks a ton. Ben cussing at this thing all day you may have saved its life.

  800. Hello!!!
    After doing the diskpart using windows Xp, can I install Windows 7 on the Hard drive?? Thanks.

    PLEASE REPLY………………..
    🙂

  804. saved me hours, instead of using some obscure third-party disk partitioning software, worked a charm.
    cheers 😀

  805. Paul – U r it man!!!! There is so much bs out there on line from people who like pretending they kno what they’re talkin about. AND from Tech Sites that take you thru useless rigoramo instead of gettin straight to it.
    Thx 2 u it took me no more than 30 secs!

  808. Man…
    I <3 U

    You saved the day of a Brazilian guy that wouldn't know what to do without your tip. *-*

  810. OMFG!!!!!!

    This post from 2008. helped me to solve my problem now in 2013. This is the solution how to install windows 7 to windows 8 machine on hdd which is gpt protected. I installed windows 7 to asus x55a. and this is the only solution that helped me. stay away from any other shit.

  813. Great advice!
    Thanks so much. I have used this to salvage an external harddrive that wouldn’t “unmount” properly from my Mac (due to disconnecting it improperly).

    Lost the data on the drive (have a backup), but at least i can use the drive again.

    Thanks for the tip. I love DOS.

  814. Had a 64GB Verbatim Pinstribe USB thumb drive that had previously been used on Mac. Windows 8 saw it as only 200MB, absolutely noting could be done. Read this article, and Awesome. Had to actually run DiskPart in Win8, rather than in XP under VMware, as DiskPart in XP couldn’t even see the drive at all. After doing the ‘clean’ under Win8, reconnected the drive to XP in VMware, and could nowsee the disk in Disk Management, unpartitioned. Just set it up as a primary partition, formatted it, and bingo it works on both OS’s. Brilliant!!!

  815. Had a 64GB Verbatim Pinstripe USB thumb drive that had previously been used on Mac. Windows 8 saw it as only 200MB, absolutely noting could be done. Read this article, and Awesome. Had to actually run DiskPart in Win8, rather than in XP under VMware, as DiskPart in XP couldn’t even see the drive at all. After doing the ‘clean’ under Win8, reconnected the drive to XP in VMware, and could nowsee the disk in Disk Management, unpartitioned. Just set it up as a primary partition, formatted it, and bingo it works on both OS’s. Brilliant!!!

  817. what about the recovery partition in the laptop ? is it going to be erased to ?
    and if so …. i would like to keep the recovery partition. what should i do ?

  822. what about the recovery partition in the laptop ? is it going to be erased to ?
    and if so …. i would like to keep the recovery partition. what should i do ?

    It would erase everything on your laptop, I wouldn’t do that……..

  824. Thank you Paul very much. The only solution that really works after all this time. Had the problem with installing Windows 7 to new Acer laptop that had Linpus OS installed. All partitions were GPT and were preventing the install, but after I have found your tip everything worked out as it should. Just brilliant!

  825. Nice one!

    You saved me from the a*sh*les of WD and Seagate, who are seemingly clueless nowadays on how to create a SIMPLE external HDD without all the INSANE and additional B*LLSH*T software add-ons, that NO ONE NEEDS.

    I just buy a hard drive for being a hard drive. If I wanted b*llsh!t, chaos and endless headaches, then I would watch the Jerry Springer show instead. Mostly, I hate over-the-top software developers anyway, who do not know how to keep things simple, useful and functional.

    I do not need a bunch of extra artwork, if I am buying a basic hard drive, now do I? Maybe WD and Seagate are more interested in flaunting their pathetic egos rather than just making good quality hard drives. Whatever..

    Well friend, YOU saved the DAY! Your post kept me from wasting $100!! So keep up the good work, eh!

  828. Hi I have a slightly diffrent question.
    Im using win 8.1 64bit.
    How do i backup a gpt-protected drive when i cant access it?

  829. These instructions are still helping in 2014. I was able to reformat an external drive for some much needed storage. Thank you !

  830. Great Post.

    Saved my 2 16GB’s USB Drives that ios manage to ruin.

    Thank you!

  831. Thanks very much, i just rekindled a samsung m3 500 gig portable drive, this would only show the start up box on certain computers so forth disabling its use. Being a student that was annoying. as i had to carry a spare and transfer info that way. 2 computers at home 1 accepted one did not, after this process i was able to use both . Thanks again

  833. Cannot Initialize disk, (its grayed out) and come up with an error message DATA ERROR: cyclic redundancy check. Thanks.

  836. I just like the helpful information you supply for your
    articles. I’ll bookmark your blog and take a look at again here frequently.
    I’m slightly sure I’ll be told many new stuff proper right here!
    Best of luck for the next!

  837. Bought two 160GB IDE HDDs from Newegg.com for an old Dell PC we are using as a file & print server, & they were apparently refurbs. One worked fine, installed XP Pro on it, the other wouldn’t show up, except in disk management as a drive with all the options grayed out.

    Fired up Hiren’s Boot CD 10.0 and ran Easus partition manager which showed me it’s a GPT disk. Your advice here was the only solution of many I tried that worked. I knew about DiskPart, but forgot what it was called and what it did. Many thanks!

  843. Pingback: Data Recovery Gpt Protective Partition

  844. I have been working in IT for 20 years and have never seen a GPT Protective Partition which seems to be the problem on a client’s HP 2000 laptop with Windows 8.1 that wouldn’t restore from the recovery partition or the factory recovery disks. I thought the hard drive had possibly failed, but installing it in one of my desktops, found it to be healthy, but protected. I did a search, immediately found your site and followed your instructions. Will now reinstall it in the laptop, hold my mouth just right and hope for the best. Thank you for being so generous with your knowledge.

  849. THE BEST AND ONLY USEFULL SOLUTION FOUND !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Just bought today an 500 GB 2.5 drive that came from an Macbook so I needed to convert it to NTFS. Lost 4+ hours for “partition manager solution includind EASEUS and other….” Thanks to this post I converted my drive to NTFS !!!! THE BEST SOLUTION EVER !

  856. i had done it, but when I finally created “New simple volume” it ends with “system cannot find the file specified”.
    Please help me.

    I m on win7
    and used this usb as bootable linux.

  860. It worked like clockwork
    Kudos

    THE BEST AND ONLY USEFULL SOLUTION FOUND !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Just bought today an 500 GB 2.5 drive that came from an Macbook so I needed to convert it to NTFS. Lost 4+ hours for “partition manager solution includind EASEUS and other….” Thanks to this post I converted my drive to NTFS !!!! THE BEST SOLUTION EVER !

    This article is excellent but I see that you aren’t using the full monetizing potential of
    your blog. You can earn pretty good promoting products related
    to health and beauty niche, don’t waste your traffic, just type in google:
    Polym’s earning ideas

    Comment

  861. this is wonderfully works, i have never really heard of disk part before but surely it helps a lot! a lot of thanks to you… may God bless you!!!

  864. Thank you very much! That’s exactly just what I need!!! Diskpart – something magical around us…

  869. Thanks very much. Your instructions were so simple and straight forward, I am very pleased with it. Got my Disk formatted. Cheers

  872. http://www.eightforums.com/drivers-hardware/58149-windows-8-1-2-ssd-windows-need-delete-one.html
    topgundcp
    Senior Member
    San Jose – California
    Posts : 2,846
    8.1x64PWMC Ubuntu14.04×64 MintMate17x64
    OK, I see. From the screen shot, I see disk 1 was intialized as dynamic disk. From dispart command, try to convert it back to basic first:
    1.diskpart
    2.select disk 1
    3.convert basic
    4.select disk 1
    5.list partition
    6.select partition 1
    7.delete partition override
    8.repeat step 6 & 7 for partition 2, 3 etc…

  880. I thank you VERY MUCH for this article! This now allows me to use the newer Western Digital external hard drives even with good old Xp. I am a computer technician, and I sometimes have to back up a customer’s data before “setting off a bunch of dynamite” (reformatting the customer’s internal HD). My old work external HD may be around 10 years old, and it may soon possibly give up the ghost. Thank you VERY MUCH!

    From John Nozum
    Owner of Knoz’em Computers, LLC

  883. Hello Paul,

    Thanks a lot for the procedure, it worked perfectly.

    Regards, Carl from Holland.

  887. Amazing, so many years later and it is still relevant!
    Saved me from re-installing my OS, thanks.

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