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How to delete GPT Protective Partition

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

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868 Comments

  1. Vibs January 23, 2008

    Thanks a ton

  2. NGR January 28, 2008

    Hey thanks heaps for that – we were pulling our hair out!

  3. Ezop March 27, 2008

    hey thanks you very much!! 🙂

  4. Paul Gu March 29, 2008 — Post Author

    No problem…

  5. Beami1 April 22, 2008

    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. Callum April 28, 2008

    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!

  7. posty April 29, 2008

    Diky moc super navod
    Thx you very much…

  8. Xman May 20, 2008

    Great! weldone! Nice and simple.

  9. Dualboot May 22, 2008

    BLESS YOU!!!!

  10. Paul Gu May 25, 2008 — Post Author

    Thank you all :D.

  11. Neonic May 25, 2008

    Thanks a lot! That was exactly what I needed.

  12. Dmitry Pavlov May 26, 2008

    Thank you very much! That’s exactly what I’m looking for! Diskpart – something magic around us 😀

  13. andrej May 29, 2008

    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!

  14. PeterO June 3, 2008

    Brilliant !!! Thank You Thank You Thank You

  15. dot19408 June 5, 2008

    w00t!!!

    Thanks, this is exactly what I’ve needed!

  16. Roz June 6, 2008

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

  17. Marc June 7, 2008

    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

  18. Paul Gu June 10, 2008 — Post Author

    No problem all.

    Great, a lot of people find this is useful….

  19. Steed June 14, 2008

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

  20. Flint Madziya June 17, 2008

    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. Paul June 24, 2008

    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

  22. iov June 26, 2008

    Thankd a million, saved my day

  23. Moses June 26, 2008

    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. Peter July 1, 2008

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

  25. Paul Gu July 1, 2008 — Post Author

    It seems very powerful tip for many people.

  26. AJ July 1, 2008

    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?

  27. Kanyball July 2, 2008

    will i lose all data from disk after that?
    thx

  28. Paul Gu July 2, 2008 — Post Author

    Hi Kanyball,

    Yes, all data will be erased!! Backup all data in that disk to another disk before you do this.

  29. Kanyball July 3, 2008

    ok any way its great tip:)

  30. Jonathan July 3, 2008

    Brilliant! Thank you very very much 🙂

  31. Garry Jackson July 18, 2008

    hey thankyou very much worked a treat your a God !!!

  32. Julio Moreno July 18, 2008

    Thanks for sharing, it really works.
    You’re good…..

  33. zoe somebody July 19, 2008

    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. Gary T July 20, 2008

    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!

  35. Paul Gu July 20, 2008 — Post Author

    No problem…. 🙂

  36. Michael G July 20, 2008

    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. MikePetonic July 23, 2008

    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

  38. Marko July 28, 2008

    Thanks man!

    I looking a long time how I can delete gpt partition.

  39. Erik July 29, 2008

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

  40. Gav C August 6, 2008

    Thanks heaps for this solution, greatly appreciated!

  41. Harry August 8, 2008

    Thank you, thank you, thank you very very much!!!!

  42. Chris August 14, 2008

    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

  43. Schaer Hans-Rudolf August 20, 2008

    It helped me a lot. Many thanks and greetings from Switzerland.

  44. jackie August 20, 2008

    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
    😉

  45. Paul Gu August 21, 2008 — Post Author

    No problem Guys … 🙂

  46. zooty August 25, 2008

    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. phil August 27, 2008

    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

  48. phil August 27, 2008

    Thanks Mate

  49. Khaled August 29, 2008

    Many thanks fo the helpfull advice, thought the new hard disk was for the bin, now its working.

  50. Scott August 29, 2008

    YOUR AWSOME!!!

  51. Hoss September 6, 2008

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

  52. Kate September 15, 2008

    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

  53. Donna September 22, 2008

    I LOVE YOU!!!! THANK YOU!!!!

  54. Cliff September 23, 2008

    Thank you very much…. u r genius

  55. Scotty Van October 7, 2008

    Thanks much, that did the trick!

  56. teps October 13, 2008

    thanks alot

  57. Oliver Kiss October 15, 2008

    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!

  58. Dude October 16, 2008

    Sweet! Thanks Man!

  59. Mark October 19, 2008

    Thanks

  60. Patrick October 24, 2008

    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.

  61. Duane October 29, 2008

    Take all the responses posted above and add a -ditto!!!!-

  62. Kalle October 30, 2008

    Thanks a lot!!!
    I was ready for the mad-house before I found your tip 🙂

  63. ddmak November 22, 2008

    Thank you so much for pointing out the Diskpart and how to use it.
    Really really appreciated.

  64. Rico November 22, 2008

    You’re my hero. Thanx!

  65. ignacio November 24, 2008

    Finally a use for diskpart! Thanks OP.

  66. rolyboy November 28, 2008

    thank you so much. worked like a charm

  67. Jymmm December 2, 2008

    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

  68. Paul Gu December 2, 2008 — Post Author

    Thanks for comments :D, this little tool is not well known to public, but it very powerful and useful.

  69. Kyle December 3, 2008

    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.

  70. Stan December 6, 2008

    Let me heap my thanks on top of the rest! Saved a near-new Mac drive (and my bacon!…)

  71. Bob December 10, 2008

    Thanks!!! I had a Netgear SC101 go south and I thought the drives went with it. This fixed it!!!

  72. Sundar December 12, 2008

    Tats brilliant

  73. John Q December 12, 2008

    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

  74. Pat December 14, 2008

    Another vote of thanks. Worked to allow me to use a Mac disk in my pc.

  75. Samir December 14, 2008

    what a lifesaver!!

  76. Neo December 17, 2008

    U the star. Thanks alot.

  77. Boris December 19, 2008

    thank you!!!!!!!!

  78. Gerhard W. Moser December 21, 2008

    thanky you very much, best answer i got, hope its ok to post it also on my site, http://www24.at.

  79. Brice December 21, 2008

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

  80. Judd Boyer December 22, 2008

    What a Xmas Gift!!! Big thank you!

  81. Joy Aman December 23, 2008

    wow, genius, thanks and thanks again

  82. Nothing2Lose January 2, 2009

    thanks a lot

  83. dota January 4, 2009

    this one is effective good work:)

  84. Paul Gu January 4, 2009 — Post Author

    DiskPart is very powerful, be careful this method will erase all data on the disk, so please backup your data first.

  85. Douba January 4, 2009

    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!

  86. Adam January 6, 2009

    That made me feel so legit. I want to kiss you right now! Thanks.

  87. Jana January 8, 2009

    Many, many thanks for a clear and effective solution

  88. Peter January 10, 2009

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

  89. Ben January 10, 2009

    Thank you so much . i love you

  90. Joey January 11, 2009

    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 🙂

  91. Paul Gu January 12, 2009 — Post Author

    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 :).

  92. Joe January 14, 2009

    Awesome. I was stuck with Mac format and thak God I found this site. Done in 10 seconds.

  93. Pro Ton January 14, 2009

    Hi,
    thanxs for the info: clear and easy to use.

  94. funky January 14, 2009

    Thank you………

  95. Willem January 17, 2009

    Many thanks

  96. occeng makassar January 27, 2009

    thank you for sharing. this tool is simple but amazing.. and you are diamond.

  97. occeng makassar January 27, 2009

    thank you. this tool is very simple but amazing. and you paul is a diamond.

  98. ----@^@---- January 28, 2009

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

  99. xHENOx January 28, 2009

    Thanks a Bunch.

    You now have HOMEBOY status here in The Bronx, NYC.

    good stuff.

  100. Alonzo January 30, 2009

    Been searching for this fix! Works great!! Thanks a lot!

  101. Nirendra Nagar February 1, 2009

    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.

  102. Paul Gu February 1, 2009 — Post Author

    I agree, and I’m the big fan of Open Source and sharing information ~~

  103. leon February 2, 2009

    amazing, simple and just worked! thx!

  104. Tom February 2, 2009

    Thank you!

  105. PaX February 5, 2009

    Does not work with USB flash drives!

  106. Cole February 6, 2009

    thanks! works like a charm!!!

  107. Paul Gu February 6, 2009 — Post Author

    PaX: Does not work with USB flash drives!

    Have you tried this tool under Vista?

    Clean it under Vista, then initialize it under XP …

  108. sk February 7, 2009

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

  109. Jerry February 16, 2009

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

  110. Nikitos February 17, 2009

    Thanks. You are the best You help me a lot

  111. Paul Gu February 20, 2009 — Post Author

    No problem ~~

  112. Andrey February 24, 2009

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

  113. Paul Gu February 24, 2009 — Post Author

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

    Thanks, lol.

  114. armshead March 1, 2009

    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.

  115. Sebastian March 2, 2009

    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!

  116. Paul Gu March 2, 2009 — Post Author

    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.”

  117. armshead March 3, 2009

    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.

    <

  118. Paul Gu March 3, 2009 — Post Author

    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.

  119. ptc1800 March 3, 2009

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

  120. Chris March 4, 2009

    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!!

  121. BADMONKEY March 4, 2009

    thanks…helped alot!!!

  122. Steve March 6, 2009

    Thank you so much for the info!!! You rock!!!

  123. SEOFIFE March 6, 2009

    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

  124. robert March 7, 2009

    dude, i am number 129 to say Thank You!

  125. Paul Gu March 9, 2009 — Post Author

    This quick tip is getting hot :)…

  126. john March 10, 2009

    u rock, thanks!

  127. Wolf March 14, 2009

    well instructed – THANKS!

  128. NinjaMan March 15, 2009

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

  129. JackieParis March 16, 2009

    Paul, this was so easy to fix! Thanks a lot for sharing this solution! Peace.

  130. haiying March 17, 2009

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

  131. Paul Gu March 17, 2009 — Post Author

    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?

  132. Taras March 19, 2009

    Thanx! It helped me a lot!

  133. Sarang Kulkarni March 21, 2009

    Dude, this is #137, Thank You very much!\
    You made my day 🙂

  134. Sarang Kulkarni March 21, 2009

    Dude, this is #139, Thank You very much!\
    You made my day 🙂

  135. Paul Gu March 21, 2009 — Post Author

    It seems Micro$oft has poor documentation… 🙂

  136. Carlos March 24, 2009

    This is useful, thanks.

  137. eric Wolter March 24, 2009

    thank you, Sir.

  138. Hemingway March 27, 2009

    thx, you saved me plenty of time not zero-ing my whole 1.5 TB drive

  139. TJ March 28, 2009

    Thank you very much, worked perfectly.

  140. yoyo March 28, 2009

    thanks its perfect

  141. Brian B March 31, 2009

    Excellent. Thank you.

  142. Mike April 1, 2009

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

  143. Paul Gu April 1, 2009 — Post Author

    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…

  144. Andrew April 1, 2009

    A hundred people have said it already – but thanks 🙂 Really helped me out.

  145. George April 5, 2009

    I cannot thank you enough. simple and to the point. Thanks again.

  146. colin April 8, 2009

    thanks buddy!

  147. Claus Conrad April 9, 2009

    Thanks no. 152 🙂

  148. Popescu Geore April 11, 2009

    Tanks !! People like you give such value to Internet !!! Really helped me !

  149. Colin Preston April 14, 2009

    Thanks dude! My HD was brand new from PC world.

  150. joxus_winner April 16, 2009

    thanks for magic ways, so my hdd can be use again

  151. FoXH April 17, 2009

    nice…. do you how to remove gpt without wiping all data on the disk? pls help

  152. Paul Gu April 19, 2009 — Post Author

    FoXH: nice…. do you how to remove gpt without wiping all data on the disk? pls help

    Please see the comment #148

  153. Ony April 20, 2009

    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

  154. Paul Gu April 21, 2009 — Post Author

    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.

  155. Toik April 23, 2009

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

  156. dhiru April 24, 2009

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

  157. Roy April 27, 2009

    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

  158. Another Roy April 30, 2009

    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!

  159. Paul Gu April 30, 2009 — Post Author

    My pleasure to share this tip…

  160. Anton May 4, 2009

    Thanks a lot!!! Few words eager to hear!

  161. SteveOH May 8, 2009

    Thanks dude…quickest fix ever!

  162. Jorge - E Shop Daddy May 8, 2009

    GREAT 🙂

    Thank you; it worked great!

    Jorge

  163. Harry Barker May 9, 2009

    Mr Gu you just saved my day and lost of valuable time!

    Bless u!

  164. Niels May 9, 2009

    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!

  165. Paul Gu May 9, 2009 — Post Author

    Thanks all of you, I like the comments 😉

  166. JD Eveland May 11, 2009

    I get to be person #172 expressing overabundantly flowing thanks! Bless you again!

  167. Harry B May 11, 2009

    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!

  168. Ed May 12, 2009

    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!

  169. Andrew Brierley May 12, 2009

    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.

  170. sleeper May 13, 2009

    +karma for you!

  171. Mike May 14, 2009

    Paul – exactly what I needed, worked like a charm!

    Thanks!

  172. Ross J Feickert May 16, 2009

    Thank you so much for this solution.

  173. Ramesh Marikhu May 19, 2009

    Thanks a lot. I can now use my new drive with no problem. Cooool.

  174. Appreciative May 19, 2009

    Thank You!

  175. Rich May 20, 2009

    Thank you so very much!

  176. Darryl May 20, 2009

    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

  177. Relequestual May 21, 2009

    man that was just what i needed. thanks a bundle! 🙂 keep it up

  178. FireDawg May 22, 2009

    Thanks Paul. You make the internet what it should be, useful.

    The Dawg

  179. Jason May 22, 2009

    Thanks a TON! Why can’t Windows Disk Manager just do it the way the Apple one can?

  180. Paul Gu May 24, 2009 — Post Author

    FireDawg: Thanks Paul.You make the internet what it should be, useful.The Dawg

    I agree …

  181. tanwill May 25, 2009

    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 !!!

  182. Jersey Guy May 27, 2009

    Thanks!!!

  183. Alejandro Romero May 27, 2009

    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!

  184. Pete Vader May 28, 2009

    Thanks so much!!! The Force is with you!!!

  185. Dave May 28, 2009

    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!

  186. Ken Kramer May 28, 2009

    Thank you very much. This was very helpful!!!

  187. Luce May 28, 2009

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

  188. J May 29, 2009

    Thanks. Precise Instruction.

  189. Jimmy May 31, 2009

    Cool, Thanks for the tip!!!

    worked perfectly!!

  190. luckyjm June 6, 2009

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

  191. moviledu June 6, 2009

    Thank you a lot !! very useful tip !!

    ^^

  192. Hector June 8, 2009

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

  193. Alectrona June 8, 2009

    Thanks a lot, very useful.

  194. yoon June 8, 2009

    HI.. Paul

    I have to say Thank you toooooooo ^^

    You are the man.

    Thank you again…. ^^

  195. Chuck June 9, 2009

    Awesome!

    THANK YOU!!!

  196. Richan S June 14, 2009

    Perfect!! Simple and Useful.
    You Safe my harddrive. Thanks you.

  197. Khalid Rauf June 14, 2009

    Its realy lesson of the day , Thanks.

  198. mattshardez June 16, 2009

    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..

  199. jj June 16, 2009

    thanks so much! really solved my problem!! 🙂

  200. samlam June 17, 2009

    thanks man this helped a lot

  201. Jessie June 17, 2009

    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.

  202. Danny June 21, 2009

    Very useful! Thank you.

  203. Stefan June 22, 2009

    10x man. U r a genius ….

  204. Stuart June 24, 2009

    Genius!

    Saves me a heap of grief and time!

    Cheers

  205. Minter June 28, 2009

    Your 210th happy customer! Thank you.

  206. lilgiant June 29, 2009

    after i initialized the disk,, the disk become unreadable,,

  207. Joel June 29, 2009

    Clear concise instructions that worked. It just doesn’t get any better.

    Thanks.

  208. Sam July 1, 2009

    Thanks! Helped a lot.

  209. Holden July 4, 2009

    thanks a lot. that made it so much easier. It saved me buying a new HDD.

  210. Allister July 5, 2009

    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 🙂

  211. Paul Dewhurst July 7, 2009

    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

  212. Paul Gu July 7, 2009 — Post Author

    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… 😀

  213. Appreciative July 10, 2009

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

  214. Philo July 10, 2009

    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!

  215. James July 12, 2009

    Brilliant, worked a treat!! Thank You! 🙂

  216. Raaht July 13, 2009

    Thanks, this was really helpful.

  217. Raaht July 13, 2009

    Thanks this was really helpful.

  218. emtken July 14, 2009

    Thank you. I fortunately did not search for long. Worked like a charm.

  219. Thierry July 14, 2009

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

    cheers 🙂

  220. MattyZamz July 14, 2009

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

  221. e89 July 14, 2009

    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..

  222. Paul Gu July 14, 2009 — Post Author

    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.

  223. Rich V July 21, 2009

    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!

  224. rmcd July 25, 2009

    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.

  225. SatisfiedUser July 25, 2009

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

  226. BETEP July 27, 2009

    Thanks a ton!

  227. Jon July 27, 2009

    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.

  228. 518 July 28, 2009

    Paul – Thank you!!!!

  229. Paul Gu July 28, 2009 — Post Author

    You are welcome, guys. 🙂

  230. Kevin July 28, 2009

    Simple instructions, that fixed the problem
    Thank you!

  231. Aunty Alias July 29, 2009

    That post has caused a disturbance in the force.

  232. Mike August 3, 2009

    Excellent – thanks a million! It solved the problem in about 2 minutes.

  233. John August 4, 2009

    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!

  234. Mukesh Joshi (Bhilwara) August 8, 2009

    Ammaging,
    Grate Knoledge for Windows.

    My Problem resolved, Thanks for solution

  235. Pétur August 11, 2009

    Thank you soooo much!!

  236. AlNik August 14, 2009

    Too easy to be true…

    🙂

    Thanks a zillion!

  237. David August 15, 2009

    Thanks! Just what I’ve been looking for!
    David from Hungary

  238. Andrea August 17, 2009

    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?

  239. Paul Gu August 17, 2009 — Post Author

    Backup the data to your Mac where you plugged in, then follow the steps above to re-format the disk.

  240. Andrea August 17, 2009

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

  241. Sean Brown August 18, 2009

    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.

  242. Kundai August 19, 2009

    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

  243. Martin August 19, 2009

    Since everyone thanked you, I’ll thanks you too:

    Thanks! =)

  244. Ali August 21, 2009

    thank you very much

    now I can use my external HDD with winxp too.

  245. ninya0704 August 22, 2009

    BRAVO!!!:) THUMBS UP!!!:) GREAT JOB:) GODSPEED:)

  246. Sean Wood August 24, 2009

    Big thanks for posting this.

  247. Tom August 26, 2009

    I had to use your tip on 4 drives i got off ebay. Thanks a ton! nice of you to assist.

  248. Chris August 27, 2009

    Nice work Paul, I’m sure plenty more will find this useful.

  249. b August 28, 2009

    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.

  250. Peter August 30, 2009

    Paul = Rock Star !!!

  251. soully August 30, 2009

    Just solved two days of headaches in 2 minutes.
    You rule.

  252. ash September 2, 2009

    thanks a lot

  253. Gianfranco September 3, 2009

    Thanks Paul!!!
    It solved the problem in about 2 minutes ….

  254. George Brooks September 4, 2009

    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?

  255. naq_saviola September 6, 2009

    really helpful..!!
    thanks!!!

  256. spruce September 8, 2009

    Great job. Thanks for taking the time to give the info.

  257. LMS September 10, 2009

    Great article. To the point. Helpful.

  258. dubi01 September 15, 2009

    you are the man!!!!

  259. Brendan September 16, 2009

    Awesome, thank you very much! 🙂

  260. Paul September 16, 2009

    Great tip! I would’ve been lost without it. Thank you!

  261. Terry September 17, 2009

    Hay Paul, Thanks for that, I tried everything to get this drive working.
    Cheers
    Terry

  262. Yako September 21, 2009

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

  263. RPM September 21, 2009

    Thank you very much! Great tech help.

  264. AM September 23, 2009

    Perfect. Thanks!

  265. Qing September 23, 2009

    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

  266. Xiaoxin September 24, 2009

    Thanks for this post. Very helpful!

  267. Bharat September 25, 2009

    Thanks so much this saved my flash drive, windows was only reading 200MB of my 8GB

  268. bill haleen September 26, 2009

    worked perfectly, you da man !!!!!!!!!!!!!

  269. Chris H September 29, 2009

    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!!

  270. Yan September 29, 2009

    Thank you so much.
    Sorted all my headache!!!

  271. Robertinoo September 30, 2009

    Thank very much. God bless you and take care !

  272. Mark K. October 1, 2009

    Nice… super simple and worked!!!

  273. Oskar October 2, 2009

    Thanks a million!

  274. Hamilton Burger October 2, 2009

    ditto.

  275. donjuan October 5, 2009

    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

  276. Harold October 5, 2009

    u da man! Thanks

  277. Nan_alice October 6, 2009

    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,

  278. Paul Gu October 6, 2009 — Post Author

    In instruction, it says under XP… make sure you follow it step by step.

  279. Moses October 8, 2009

    Great post saved me a trip back to the people I purchased my gbt protected drive from!

  280. Dale October 8, 2009

    Google + Your Tip = Win.

    Thank you.

    Dale

  281. michael October 13, 2009

    Absolutely brilliant….i cant thank you enough paul…..you have saved my day. 🙂

  282. Jinny October 13, 2009

    You make my day.

    Thank you very much. I can use my HDD now.

  283. Mike October 15, 2009

    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!) 🙂

  284. jay October 17, 2009

    I can use this “mac” hdd for my PS3!! Thanks alot Paul

  285. digitalmandave October 18, 2009

    Thanks very much Paul,Cheers!

  286. Dirk October 24, 2009

    Excellent. Thanks, Paul.

  287. Raul October 25, 2009

    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

  288. CMF October 25, 2009

    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!!!

  289. Paul October 28, 2009

    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.

  290. elmsier420 October 29, 2009

    Hei thanx 😀 savd me a lotta trouble

  291. JILL October 30, 2009

    OMG it works…thank you so much….

  292. Omar October 30, 2009

    Absolutely Fantastic! Works a treat! Thanks! Much Appreciated, Useful to know! 🙂

  293. lex October 30, 2009

    Excellent, very helpful indeed!

  294. Sumsky October 31, 2009

    Thanx man, very quick and helpful information.

  295. Jon November 1, 2009

    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!

  296. qafro November 3, 2009

    Your a star !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  297. Paul Gu November 4, 2009 — Post Author

    Thanks all for great comments….

  298. gamsie November 5, 2009

    Thanks dude

    ill all the way in South Africa, Johannesburg and u saved me like R.kelly Say…. Thanks Man

  299. CWD November 6, 2009

    Frickn SAWEEEEEEETT

    Thx

  300. Patrick Allen November 9, 2009

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!

  301. Val November 10, 2009

    It works well. Really practical stuff. Thanks a lot

  302. Emma November 11, 2009

    Thank you so much, saved me so much time and trouble!

  303. Manoj November 13, 2009

    Excellent! thank you very much…saved lot of time.
    God Bless you.

  304. Caio November 14, 2009

    Good Job! Good explanation! Well done…

  305. Psifis November 18, 2009

    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

  306. Davi November 18, 2009

    MANY THANKS!
    Worked perfectly!

  307. Lee November 18, 2009

    Paul, thanks to you I can use my external disks again.

  308. Narayan November 18, 2009

    God Bless You
    And Let Satan hug Microsoft!

  309. ahmed November 21, 2009

    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

    <>

  310. ahmed November 21, 2009

    plz help me man

  311. Paul Gu November 21, 2009 — Post Author

    If it’s not working in Windows 7, then try it in Windows XP.

  312. republicans.suck November 21, 2009

    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.

  313. republicans.suck November 21, 2009

    BTW for those of you using vista you don’t need to go to the cmd prompt. just type diskpart in Start Sarch dialogue box.

  314. Christian November 25, 2009

    Dude…… YOUR THE MAN!!!!! I’VE NEVER heard of this tool. THANK YOU so much! YOU Rock!

  315. aidin November 26, 2009

    you help me aloooooottttt
    thanks a million.

  316. DavX November 30, 2009

    You don’t know how much that has helped, thanks again and again

    So dam simple

  317. Uptown December 4, 2009

    Thanks!! The above information worked for me. I was really close to taking my hard drive back to the store. 🙂

  318. john December 4, 2009

    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!!

  319. Dave December 5, 2009

    A thousand thanks for a most helpful post. Wishing you the happiest of holidays.

  320. Patrick December 7, 2009

    Thank you!!!

  321. TK December 8, 2009

    This is a Xmas Gift!
    My Lacie 500 GB is now back to work!
    Thank you very much!

  322. Paul December 9, 2009

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

    Cheers.

  323. Richard H December 12, 2009

    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.

  324. stan December 12, 2009

    Thank you for the great info
    Cheers to you

  325. Henrik Bjerregaard Clausen December 14, 2009

    Found your site via a google search. Solved the problem with my Mac formatted disk.

    Really helpful, thanks a lot!

  326. Jim Heath December 14, 2009

    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

  327. Tasha December 15, 2009

    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.

  328. Shaun December 15, 2009

    Many thanks !

  329. Hector December 16, 2009

    You are the best!

  330. Jonathan December 17, 2009

    Wow, that worked great, thanks for that!!

  331. Paul December 17, 2009

    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!

  332. rt December 18, 2009

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

  333. DHH December 21, 2009

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

  334. Clericol December 23, 2009

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

  335. IronLegend December 24, 2009

    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

  336. John December 29, 2009

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

    WORKS PERFECT!

  337. joe December 30, 2009

    you rock!!! just saved my life 🙂

  338. matalino January 2, 2010

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

    thanks!

  339. Paul January 2, 2010

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

  340. DAVE January 8, 2010

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

  341. Natalia January 8, 2010

    Thank you!!!! Very helpful!

  342. Sucaba January 10, 2010

    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

  343. Alex January 14, 2010

    Thank you very much… Sometimes the “simplest” things are the most time consuming 🙂

  344. Rachel January 17, 2010

    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

  345. Ngov Rithy January 20, 2010

    What a wonder!
    Thanks a million.
    I spent ages and lots of effort to solve this problem. And now i’ve solved it. Thank again.

  346. cassio January 20, 2010

    Great!!!! thanks a lot!

  347. O.E.F. January 20, 2010

    Thanks 🙂

  348. Moresby Guy January 20, 2010

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

  349. mike January 21, 2010

    you were a great help! mike

  350. Jason Brown January 22, 2010

    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!!!!!!

  351. Bernald Solano January 23, 2010

    man thanks a lot!!!

  352. baosangvu January 25, 2010

    thanks you alot. I hope to have more useful ideas from your blog.

  353. rocky January 25, 2010

    thanks man. it really help.

  354. Gyuszi January 27, 2010

    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!

  355. sam January 27, 2010

    Hi ! paul
    thank you for helping me to delete GPT PARTITION on my hard drive , GOOD JOB.
    MANNY!!!!THANK

  356. sam January 28, 2010

    HI PAUL.
    How can i get chinese words on YOUTUBE

  357. larry January 29, 2010

    thank you.

  358. John January 30, 2010

    Thanks with DISKPART!!!!!!!! I had no idea.

  359. BartGeek January 30, 2010

    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!

  360. Desperate February 1, 2010

    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.

  361. Paul Gu February 1, 2010 — Post Author

    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.

  362. Desperate February 2, 2010

    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!

  363. Paul Gu February 2, 2010 — Post Author

    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?

  364. SLEEPINGDREEMS February 4, 2010

    thanks a lot its work i am really very thank full to u guys.

  365. Ron February 5, 2010

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

  366. Bhomert February 6, 2010

    Thanks bro.. nice tut

  367. Jay February 7, 2010

    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.

  368. Mac February 10, 2010

    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!

  369. Jaime February 10, 2010

    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?

  370. mikitukka February 11, 2010

    @ 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.

  371. Tom Smith February 12, 2010

    Very nice – thanks.

  372. els February 16, 2010

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

  373. Swapnil L Kadam February 17, 2010

    Hi Paul,

    Thanks yaar…
    IT’S WORKS YAAR. AGAIN THANKS FOR SOLUTION.

  374. Rich February 17, 2010

    Thanks Paul,

    Saved me a trip back across town to plug a drive back into the Mac and erase it!

  375. billandrews77 February 20, 2010

    thank you!!! your advice was perfect … could not find this info anywhere else.

  376. dr. gonzo February 25, 2010

    thanks a million for sharing this information!

  377. Rutul February 25, 2010

    this is great mathod Thanks.
    Thank you very much.

  378. CartAir February 25, 2010

    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!

  379. Chris February 26, 2010

    Spot On! Thanks!

  380. oceanstreet February 27, 2010

    I can’t thank you enough, I spent a whole day trying.

  381. Thorbjørn February 28, 2010

    Thanks! Worked smoothly! 😀

  382. Fred March 2, 2010

    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.

  383. Paul Gu March 2, 2010 — Post Author

    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 🙂

  384. chirp305 March 3, 2010

    hallelujah

    hallelujah

    hallelujah hallelujah

    halle——lujah

    lol

    Im saved.

  385. Arash March 4, 2010

    Thanks that worked great.

  386. razrunlocker March 5, 2010

    Thanks a lot. Keep it up!

  387. John March 11, 2010

    What can I say but thank you lots.
    Yet another reason not to use ex Mac drives 🙂

  388. Chak March 13, 2010

    Thanks from Japan! It worked.

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

    Best regards!!

    CHak

  389. Chak March 13, 2010

    Thanks from Japan! It worked.

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

    Best regards!!

    CHak

  390. Paul Gu March 14, 2010 — Post Author

    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…

  391. rao March 15, 2010

    Thanks a lot, this help me a lot.

  392. Duran255 March 16, 2010

    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.

  393. Nyon March 17, 2010

    this is such a life saver. thanks from vistor #405. you just made my day a great one.

  394. Brad March 18, 2010

    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!

  395. Jeremy March 23, 2010

    You are the man!

    Thanks

  396. Rey March 27, 2010

    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.

  397. Quame April 1, 2010

    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.

  398. Alexandra April 2, 2010

    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

  399. Vyce April 2, 2010

    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.

  400. Paul Gu April 2, 2010 — Post Author

    As Vyce mentioned, It will only clear that HDD.

  401. Nanajoth April 4, 2010

    Awesome! Thank you so much.

  402. Skipster April 5, 2010

    Worked perfectly – Many thanks

  403. Johan Karlsson April 5, 2010

    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.

  404. Nasir April 6, 2010

    That helped a lot. got it done in no time.

  405. Todd April 8, 2010

    Thank you! Didn’t know that one!

  406. Stephan Nicholls April 10, 2010

    Thanks – quick, easy and worked perfectly

  407. Me me me April 10, 2010

    Easy steps to follow, straight to the point and accurate.

    Very helpful.

  408. Rick April 12, 2010

    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

  409. askme233 April 12, 2010

    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.

  410. Stouf April 14, 2010

    great! excellent ! thanks a lot. Merci.

  411. K.O. April 16, 2010

    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.

  412. K.O. April 16, 2010

    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.

  413. Bryce April 21, 2010

    Worked perfectly. But dang that DiskPart utility is scary. One false move…

  414. Riezza April 24, 2010

    its work on my ex MAC disk 🙂

  415. Hamid April 27, 2010

    Hi
    Thanks alot my friend
    it was very helpful & life saver!

    good luck
    Regards

  416. Conny April 28, 2010

    Thanks for the info, works like a charm.

  417. Don April 28, 2010

    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.

  418. Dean N April 29, 2010

    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

  419. Mark April 30, 2010

    Outstanding post.

    Learn something new every day!

    mark

  420. grateful April 30, 2010

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

  421. Bill May 1, 2010

    Right on! Exactly what I was looking for.

  422. dheeraj May 10, 2010

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

  423. Dan May 13, 2010

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

  424. Singh May 14, 2010

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

    good luck and god bless you
    Best Regards

  425. RonD May 18, 2010

    Another happy person. This worked well.
    Thanks heaps…..

  426. Michael May 19, 2010

    Works great. Thank you

  427. Dude May 21, 2010

    Thanks! Was very confusing and frustrating. Your method worked like a champ!

  428. Fdugenou May 21, 2010

    Another very satisfied reader… thanks a lot

  429. vggeli May 23, 2010

    Great! This worked for me.

  430. Deghi May 26, 2010

    Thanks a lot. All the best!

  431. Pete May 26, 2010

    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!

  432. kevin lee June 2, 2010

    Thanks alot! Saved me headache and time.

  433. Patrick June 3, 2010

    Thank you, this was exactly what I was looking for!

  434. JohnnyBoyClub June 4, 2010

    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

  435. Oliver June 4, 2010

    ACE 450 positive feed backs, helped me out

  436. Hal June 6, 2010

    Honestly the best computer tech response I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

  437. Aemil June 7, 2010

    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.

  438. Gui Ambros June 7, 2010

    Awesome, worked flawlessly. I wasn’t even aware DISKPART was still part of Win7, after so many years..

  439. Vivek June 18, 2010

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

  440. Allan Lobrigo June 21, 2010

    Thanks a Lot, it workds for me.

  441. Fakeer June 24, 2010

    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.

  442. CzR512 June 24, 2010

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

  443. JJ June 29, 2010

    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?

  444. Ian June 29, 2010

    You rock brotha–thanks!

  445. Aptozi July 1, 2010

    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.

  446. squeak July 2, 2010

    you rock man !!!!!!!!!!!!!

  447. Alan July 4, 2010

    Thanks a bunch, worked like a charm.

  448. Monkeybanjo July 5, 2010

    Thanks! It works.

  449. Dondi July 7, 2010

    Thanks Paul for tip — saved a lot of time and effort.

  450. Chris Jones July 8, 2010

    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.

  451. Phantom July 12, 2010

    It helped!

    Thanks a lot!

  452. Frank Swan July 12, 2010

    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?

  453. Larry Meza July 13, 2010

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

    TY,

    LM

  454. James Harrison July 14, 2010

    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

  455. Shekri July 14, 2010

    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,

  456. LK July 15, 2010

    Most places are all talk and no action. Your info was the opposite

  457. Kristoffer July 18, 2010

    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

  458. Paul Gu July 18, 2010 — Post Author

    Hi Kristoffer,

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

  459. Smac01 July 22, 2010

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

  460. Karl July 22, 2010

    30 months after original post, and still a life saver!!
    Thank you!!!!!!!

  461. Craig July 25, 2010

    fantastic.worked 1st time. Thank you very much

  462. Anas July 27, 2010

    YOUR AWSOME!!!

  463. Ana July 27, 2010

    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

  464. Paul Gu July 27, 2010 — Post Author

    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.

  465. Nader July 30, 2010

    thanks a Ton …

  466. Jim August 4, 2010

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

  467. Chris August 7, 2010

    Top Class quick simple and works Cheers

  468. Norman August 9, 2010

    thanks alot.

  469. Rommel August 9, 2010

    Thanks a lot partner it did great!!!

  470. Kilburnlad August 9, 2010

    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.

  471. Kilburnlad August 9, 2010

    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.

  472. SurferX August 12, 2010

    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

  473. Leo Huynh August 18, 2010

    Wonderful thank you ….
    Leo

  474. DameDash2000 August 22, 2010

    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.

  475. Mario August 23, 2010

    Hi Paul
    Fantastic!!!
    You Rocks!!!
    Thanks
    Mario

  476. frenzyamber August 24, 2010

    Thanks!

  477. Patrice Blais August 25, 2010

    Yeah!

    solid procedure.

    Thank you.

  478. Ryan August 26, 2010

    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.

  479. Laurie August 27, 2010

    Absolutely BRILLIANT I was going spare, Thanks!!!!!

  480. muhammad nurkholis August 28, 2010

    thank you, well well well

  481. Idiot August 31, 2010

    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!

  482. FLEMMING JENSEN September 1, 2010

    thx a ton.. tho i still had trouble coz im a dummy with pc.. but in combine with this link i was able to do it
    http://ss64.com/nt/diskpart.html

  483. William September 1, 2010

    Thanks a million…

  484. ckl September 2, 2010

    Thanks!

  485. Shoel September 2, 2010

    thanks a ton!

  486. freeze September 7, 2010

    still useable until now, Thanks!

  487. javier d September 7, 2010

    wow! thank you very much!!!
    i lost a lot of time trying to find a solution!
    thanks!!!

  488. Ben September 7, 2010

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

  489. ronald September 9, 2010

    Thanks a lot works perfectly !

  490. corin September 9, 2010

    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! 🙂

  491. /mek September 11, 2010

    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! 😀

  492. TAZ September 16, 2010

    YOU ARE A LIFESAVER!!!!!

  493. Cutco Steak Knives September 16, 2010

    Hi,Paul
    Worked for me.
    Thank you so much!

  494. Alex G September 18, 2010

    Great post!!! Really helpfull

  495. Mark September 20, 2010

    Thanks a million!

  496. roy September 21, 2010

    Thanks!

  497. Lionel September 21, 2010

    Thanks, I know this is an older post, but it helped me.

  498. Michael McGahan September 22, 2010

    Very helpful! Many thanks

  499. Lorin September 27, 2010

    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

  500. Drencha September 28, 2010

    Thanks a lot for informacion.

  501. Mohamed Hosni September 30, 2010

    i don’t know what to say………..
    really ….. thnx alooooooooooooooooot

  502. Etienne Van Roosendael October 5, 2010

    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.

  503. carshagen October 7, 2010

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

  504. Yet Another Guy October 22, 2010

    Seriously, thanks for this.

  505. Olly October 23, 2010

    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 🙂

  506. afiat October 24, 2010

    thanks a lot bro, it’s help solved my harddisk problom, God Bless you, keep writing

  507. Carol October 24, 2010

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

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

  508. Paul Gu October 28, 2010 — Post Author

    It was display problem…. fix it, it should look good.

  509. Steph November 4, 2010

    legend – Worked perfect!

  510. gur November 4, 2010

    thank you it works great !!!

  511. Steevo November 10, 2010

    Thanks!

  512. Dave November 13, 2010

    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.

  513. Thien Vien Dai Dang November 15, 2010

    Thank you so much!!!!!!!!

  514. wadadlibeer November 15, 2010

    Like someone said Earlier Been working in IT for 15 years never heard of disk part Thank you

  515. rich November 18, 2010

    Fantastic , thanks very much , had been puzzleing for hours, sorted in 2 mins

  516. dan November 18, 2010

    Thanks so much! now i can backup and breathe easy!

  517. Harry November 20, 2010

    That was amazing dude…thank u…

  518. ShariefM November 25, 2010

    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 🙂

  519. andrew November 26, 2010

    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

  520. delta9 December 2, 2010

    how about same question for windows 7 ultimate x64?

  521. delta9 December 2, 2010

    and the answer is exactly the same – fantastic –

    *starts installing on new ibis ssd

    Thankyou x

  522. STAJAN VJ December 9, 2010

    Wow! simple but very effective.Thanks

  523. Prady December 10, 2010

    Thank u so much………

  524. ken December 10, 2010

    Thank you very much paul. you saved the day for me.

  525. VLion December 12, 2010

    The best solution. All other search results lead to boondocks

  526. sam December 13, 2010

    PAULY TAT WAS SICK ..THANKS MAN

  527. Jason December 14, 2010

    thank you please email if i need help again

  528. Kev December 15, 2010

    Thanks!! Worked great!

  529. Dallas December 15, 2010

    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!!

  530. Ben Schreiber December 20, 2010

    Hi Paul,

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

    Greetings from Germany,
    Ben

  531. Den December 20, 2010

    Great Help.
    Thanks

  532. Rodat1 December 26, 2010

    GENIUS !!!

  533. t02 December 27, 2010

    thanks a lot, its work. good jobs

  534. Stn December 27, 2010

    Thank you…. 🙂

  535. David December 27, 2010

    And that gentlemen is how we do that…….

    Thanks

  536. Alex December 30, 2010

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

  537. Paul Gu December 30, 2010 — Post Author

    Happy new year to all visitors and appreciate all comments :).

  538. kevin January 5, 2011

    This is very simple, straight forward, yet very help.

  539. andy January 8, 2011

    thanks a lot dude…

  540. b January 11, 2011

    thanks a lot

  541. Nikhil January 19, 2011

    Is there any way to read the data of a GPT protective drive on wndows XP??

  542. Balaji January 22, 2011

    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.

  543. Balaji January 22, 2011

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

  544. Paul Gu January 22, 2011 — Post Author

    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.

  545. Billy B January 29, 2011

    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.

  546. Lonk666 February 3, 2011

    Cheers…….nice work…..

  547. juantxo February 3, 2011

    Thank you!

  548. Rolkis February 6, 2011

    Thanks a lot! you’r great!

  549. wayan dedy February 8, 2011

    thanks a lot
    very helpful & work done

  550. Jess February 11, 2011

    Just like everyone else said….Thanks!

  551. cy February 12, 2011

    thanks! gpt was driving me crazy!

  552. UsrX February 15, 2011

    Thanks alot! 🙂

  553. mark4 February 15, 2011

    Brilliant – wish I’d known about this sooner!

  554. Ben February 17, 2011

    >>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.

  555. dapoppa February 19, 2011

    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!

  556. Jakon February 21, 2011

    Bam, worked like a harm. Thx

  557. zameen February 24, 2011

    thank you it worked great ! gotta love DOS !!

  558. Dominic March 20, 2011

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

  559. dore March 20, 2011

    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!

  560. Josh March 22, 2011

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

  561. Popo March 26, 2011

    Thank you soooo much !!!!!

  562. No Longer Frustrated March 30, 2011

    Wow, thank you. You just kept me from pulling all of my hair out.

  563. Warren March 31, 2011

    Thanks dude!

  564. Sherif Maged March 31, 2011

    Thank A lot

  565. Russell April 1, 2011

    Thanks a lot. Saved a LOT of time.

    Russell

  566. Russell April 1, 2011

    Thanks a lot.

    Saved me a LOT of heart ache…

  567. jeremy April 6, 2011

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

  568. josiah April 8, 2011

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

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

    how?

  569. X0B1Nn1 April 9, 2011

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

  570. Chardnsx April 10, 2011

    Wow! You rock man! This solved my problem with my 2TB WD drive..

  571. Chris April 11, 2011

    Excellent Dude, you are Awesome!!!

    Thanks for the Help!

  572. Mahesh April 15, 2011

    Thanks Dude;

    Nice Info. in simple language.

  573. Finally April 16, 2011

    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

  574. bgn April 17, 2011

    excellent man. such a simple thing can do this

  575. wazzup April 18, 2011

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

  576. Jonni April 26, 2011

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

  577. StuartJP April 30, 2011

    Thanks very much indeed! Worked perfectly.

  578. Aljo May 4, 2011

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

  579. Mark May 5, 2011

    Spot on, worked pefectly, thanks 🙂

  580. katan May 6, 2011

    Thank u very much indeed !!!

  581. tieQ May 6, 2011

    Thanks a lot for this one. Cheers!

  582. GanteDawg May 7, 2011

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

  583. Wilson May 11, 2011

    Great help Sir. Thanks.

  584. JeffTroiano May 17, 2011

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

    It saved my life!

    THANKS A LOT

  585. admin May 25, 2011

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

    I bow to your fearless awesomeness ……. 🙂

  586. Shabu Gonsalviz June 1, 2011

    Thanks a lot….

  587. lesvosevents.com June 1, 2011

    Thanks for you help

  588. may June 1, 2011

    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

  589. skyricho June 10, 2011

    This worked. Thanks

  590. tuyk June 16, 2011

    thank you so much!

  591. B2 June 17, 2011

    Thank you, God bless you

  592. Joseph June 18, 2011

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

  593. Ennis June 19, 2011

    Thanx!

  594. rafiq June 21, 2011

    THANKS FOR UR INFORMATION

  595. Sreekanth June 21, 2011

    Thanks you very very much

  596. EmilynFostanes June 23, 2011

    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!

  597. Konstantine June 25, 2011

    THANK YOU!

  598. Irshad ali June 27, 2011

    commandncode.blogspot.com

  599. Johnny B July 2, 2011

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

  600. Annonymous July 2, 2011

    Thanks A Lot,
    Your A Lifesaver
    Best Regards,
    Annoymous

  601. NU July 13, 2011

    Thank you so much! Was screaming my head off at the computer lol

  602. you post is a saviour July 18, 2011

    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.

  603. daily deals July 19, 2011

    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!

  604. z July 23, 2011

    test

  605. Marcos Hernandez July 24, 2011

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

  606. kozel23 July 27, 2011

    http://en.kioskea.net/download/done/download-127-hp-usb-disk-storage-format-tool

    works perfect with USB flash drives – easy to use 🙂

  607. Thankful August 1, 2011

    Thank you very much.
    You are very helpful!!!!

  608. 1 tb external hard drive mafia August 8, 2011

    WOW!! I cant believe i once paid someone to remove this GPT thing,i feel so stupid!LOL

  609. William August 8, 2011

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

  610. selimjan August 10, 2011

    big man 😀

  611. Simona August 11, 2011

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

    All the best!

  612. Navid August 13, 2011

    thanks, it works.

  613. Alek August 14, 2011

    or if you don’t use windows

    http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

  614. Javier August 14, 2011

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

    This is a true solution!

  615. Jamil Khan August 16, 2011

    Thanks Alot Dear………. Very Help Full for Learners THANKS

  616. SENTHIL August 17, 2011

    thanks a lot 4 u r info

  617. Denis August 19, 2011

    First article I found: quick and easy solution. THANKS!!!!!!

  618. Cents August 25, 2011

    You rock! I thought my drive was DOA but this fixed it.

  619. Robert August 26, 2011

    Worked so easily! What a great fix

  620. Les August 27, 2011

    Merseyside Many thanks worked a treat.

  621. CJ August 28, 2011

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

  622. SpyUC August 31, 2011

    Great Help!

    Straight forward, fast and best of all…. IT WORKS!

  623. Rens Dutch September 2, 2011

    Thanks, worked like a charm.

  624. santosh kumar punna September 8, 2011

    Thanks Dude its worked

  625. Rick September 11, 2011

    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.

  626. james September 12, 2011

    Hi, Thanks for the appreciation.

  627. Marshall September 14, 2011

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

  628. Paul Gu September 18, 2011 — Post Author

    really appreciate your feedback……..

  629. Prabir Dangol September 19, 2011

    I need badly . I got Solution. Thank You Very very Much…

    Prabir
    Nepal

  630. sivakumar September 24, 2011

    working.Very thanks

  631. RobIsThankful September 25, 2011

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

  632. wp September 27, 2011

    Thanks man it work for me and i didn’t even have to put that much work into it

  633. Jakester October 2, 2011

    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.

  634. Aftab October 11, 2011

    Thank you boss.

  635. sig October 11, 2011

    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.

  636. Carl October 19, 2011

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

    Cheers,

  637. Sajjad October 30, 2011

    Thanks a lot… it is really saves a lot of time… Thanks Thanks..

  638. Rich November 9, 2011

    Great, thanks….

  639. Daryl November 20, 2011

    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!

  640. Amir November 22, 2011

    THANK YOU VERY MUCH….. YOU ARE AWESOME!!!!

  641. Shagi November 24, 2011

    Geart – this saved my day
    so simple and clean… 🙂

    Cheers

  642. Sarah November 24, 2011

    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.)

  643. sandeep November 27, 2011

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

  644. @MatoSoup November 29, 2011

    I agree with the other 682 people who were here before me. THANKS!

  645. freeze December 1, 2011

    this article helping me twice !!! ^_^

  646. Rob December 1, 2011

    Like the other 685 or so totally still works and it helped me twice as well

  647. Rafael Oliver December 5, 2011

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

  648. sebestianyourey December 7, 2011

    thanks for your timely help. i realy thanks to you

  649. Roshan December 8, 2011

    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.

  650. satya December 9, 2011

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

    Thank you very much

  651. Gavin B December 16, 2011

    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

  652. Victor M December 24, 2011

    Thanks! Realy saved me some time 🙂

  653. Miro December 26, 2011

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

  654. Liviu December 30, 2011

    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….

  655. Paul Gu December 30, 2011 — Post Author

    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.

  656. Jae Kim January 3, 2012

    ThAnK yOu!

    Now can use an old laptop hardrive as a giant USB drive.

  657. Dunk January 8, 2012

    Sweet… thanks dude…. didn’t even know of that app.

  658. Sean Lane January 12, 2012

    I had given up hope. Thanx the Hard Drive is now working!!!!!

    Sean
    South Africa

  659. Kazi Maksud January 22, 2012

    Thank u.

  660. sonjubaba January 24, 2012

    thanx…………….

  661. R. Wing January 24, 2012

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

  662. mac January 25, 2012

    graet super super super super super super help
    tttttt hhhhhh aaaaa nnnn kkkkk ssssss

    thnx

  663. JoePeach January 26, 2012

    Perfect! I thank You.

  664. Jack Mc.Goff February 4, 2012

    Here it is in the year 2012 and this helped me too. Thank you so much….

  665. Amr Gad February 7, 2012

    thanks..
    Simple and Effective

  666. Haroldo Macêdo February 13, 2012

    Thanks!

  667. Ranjith February 14, 2012

    Thanks for the post.

    Its worked for me. Thanks for the help.

  668. Chris February 18, 2012

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

    Thank you very much.

    Regards

    Chris

  669. arthet February 22, 2012

    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

  670. Lucas February 25, 2012

    Super good, thank you!

  671. Eathan Gleiner March 1, 2012

    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.

  672. Amit March 5, 2012

    thanks a lot

  673. Decebal March 8, 2012

    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

  674. Kurt March 9, 2012

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

  675. Jean-Philippe March 13, 2012

    Thanks a lot, I got a disk with this stupid GPT format, now I can check it…

  676. Martin (Norway) March 13, 2012

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

  677. venkat March 14, 2012

    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 ….

  678. uling noha March 18, 2012

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

  679. Paul Gu March 18, 2012 — Post Author

    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.

  680. MAC March 19, 2012

    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.

  681. David March 19, 2012

    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.

  682. Nikolai March 21, 2012

    Than you! Needed a quick fix for that and it worked like magic. Excellent manual!

  683. Leven March 22, 2012

    Thx m8 you are awsome 😉

  684. Mahesh Ambalia March 24, 2012

    Great dear thanks a lot for great solution.

  685. roman March 25, 2012

    Saved the day. THANK YOU

  686. wali March 26, 2012

    thanks a lot

  687. mty17 March 28, 2012

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

  688. Muhammad Idrees March 29, 2012

    Many many thanks, I worked 100%

  689. RandEE April 3, 2012

    THANKS!!!!

  690. Sid April 4, 2012

    Thanks! This worked perfectly!

  691. Ethan Shock April 10, 2012

    THANK YOU SO MUCH. DiskPart FTW. Stuff like this is why people hate windows

  692. rf April 11, 2012

    thank you thank you

  693. Paul April 12, 2012

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

  694. vishal chib April 13, 2012

    Thanks a tons!! really sort out my problem.

  695. Rick April 22, 2012

    Dude you absolutely rock and know rocks I am one when it comes to computers

  696. Ryan April 23, 2012

    So freakin ridiculous, man. I was ready to scrap the thing. Thank you so much.

  697. Chadsta April 23, 2012

    Man… worked like a charm. Much appreciated.

  698. George Andah April 24, 2012

    Thanks, it works.

  699. HitKing April 26, 2012

    What a helpful post. Thank you so much!

  700. Tom April 27, 2012

    Yep, this advice is still needed and accurate.

  701. n@nandj.me.uk April 28, 2012

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

  702. ashraf April 28, 2012

    thanks man

  703. lobloco April 29, 2012

    Thnks a bunch. Saved me headaches.

  704. Abdul April 29, 2012

    Thank you very very very much!

  705. Kurt May 3, 2012

    Thank you very much, solved my Problem perfectly

  706. henri May 5, 2012

    Awesome! just what I needed!

  707. gogonutsss May 6, 2012

    THANKSSS!

  708. Phil May 10, 2012

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

  709. Prakash Kumar Patra May 14, 2012

    WELL DONE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    VERY GOOD SOLUTIONS

  710. Anthony May 14, 2012

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

  711. JJMcquire May 15, 2012

    I use both windows XP and MacOSX snow leopard. Thanks

  712. Him May 17, 2012

    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!

  713. Gshyam May 17, 2012

    Thank

  714. Stephen May 22, 2012

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

  715. Mike May 27, 2012

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

  716. Raj May 27, 2012

    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.

  717. Appidemic May 28, 2012

    Still helping. Thanks a lot.

  718. Ken Schiff May 30, 2012

    Just want to say “ditto” to all the above.

  719. Thales Macchione May 30, 2012

    Thank you very much!

  720. Jim Khor May 30, 2012

    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 ^_^

  721. keith June 7, 2012

    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.

  722. ddd June 8, 2012

    Y.O.U A.R.E T.H.E B.E.S.T !

  723. Riddim36 June 9, 2012

    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.

  724. Peter June 18, 2012

    Great! Simple yet effective! Couldn’t be better! 😉

  725. Bob June 21, 2012

    Absolutely the right solution, wish I found it sooner!

  726. James Nishimuta June 28, 2012

    u are amazing. I hope you got a killer job and are a billionarie now

  727. Irwan July 3, 2012

    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.

  728. Javier July 4, 2012

    Nice. It worked like a charm.

  729. Paul July 4, 2012

    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 🙂

  730. Ilyas July 7, 2012

    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.

  731. Nguyễn Thế Bình July 8, 2012

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

  732. alif July 13, 2012

    tg. it’s help fuel 🙂

  733. Ronald Liew July 13, 2012

    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.

  734. anonymous internet denizen July 20, 2012

    Thanks! Worked great.

  735. trevor August 6, 2012

    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.

  736. Abdur Rahman August 7, 2012

    Thank you very much dear for support
    Thanks a lot

  737. jiri August 11, 2012

    great ! many thanks, saved my life.

  738. Caverdog August 11, 2012

    You sir, are a wonderful human being. Quick, easy to follow instructions. Thanks.

  739. peja August 14, 2012

    Thanks Paul… Let’s drink with me someday…

  740. Chris Okafor August 16, 2012

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

  741. Kevin August 20, 2012

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

  742. Thamas August 22, 2012

    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.

  743. Steve August 30, 2012

    How could I not comment on this fix!
    Thanks mate as this was driving me crazy……….

  744. Magnus Bonnevier August 31, 2012

    Indeed i want to thank you for this priceless tip. 🙂

    Good day to you sir.

  745. nadeem September 7, 2012

    Thank you so much.

  746. chippy September 9, 2012

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

  747. Zufri Ibrahim January 30, 2013

    Thankyou very much 🙂

  748. Microeyes January 31, 2013

    but i lost nearly 100 gb of space 🙁

  749. Microeyes January 31, 2013

    including my recovery data… lost my win 8 os, drivers, etc wit tat 100 gb 🙁 :'(

  750. Paul Gu January 31, 2013 — Post Author

    Sorry to hear that, always backup data first before proceed this…

  751. celio February 1, 2013

    I love you so much!

  752. raaj Samgi February 3, 2013

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

  753. Paul Pranskaitis February 5, 2013

    best tip ever…..thanks

  754. MUSIK February 9, 2013

    very thanks 🙂

  755. hans February 9, 2013

    may GOD Bless you
    Thanks a ton

  756. Steve February 18, 2013

    very good thanks

  757. فرشيد نظري February 23, 2013

    tnx alot
    خيلي نوكرتيم داش

  758. ivu March 3, 2013

    WOW! thanks

  759. Ran March 5, 2013

    Thnx man!!! Great post! very helpful!!!

  760. Pierfrancesco March 5, 2013

    Thanks from Italy! You helped me a lot , nice job

  761. AK March 7, 2013

    Thanks a lot for the help

  762. Jonny Hungary March 9, 2013

    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

  763. Graeme Scott March 27, 2013

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

  764. James Kazoob March 28, 2013

    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 🙂

  765. ಪ್ರವೀಣ್ March 30, 2013

    ಧನ್ಯವಾದಗಳು

  766. prakash April 2, 2013

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

  767. Andrew Panziear April 2, 2013

    Thanks, this worked a treat!

  768. Spanky April 2, 2013

    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…

  769. Jay April 3, 2013

    Thank you so much! I have spent HOURS looking for this fix!

  770. sakraforte April 12, 2013

    thank you so much

  771. Claus Schlueter April 16, 2013

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

  772. Saravanan April 17, 2013

    wowwww !!

    Unbelievable…

  773. dave April 21, 2013

    Armshead

    Armshead sounds angry.
    Paul saved the day and Armshead got upset.

  774. Devin April 24, 2013

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

  775. Richard May 6, 2013

    You’re genius!!!
    It’s fu****g awesome!!!
    Thanks a lot…

  776. FenoCool May 22, 2013

    THANKS A TON OF TONS OF TONS OF TONS!!!

  777. Daryl June 20, 2013

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

    PLEASE REPLY………………..
    🙂

  778. chester June 20, 2013

    thanks a mill worked like a boom

  779. vincent June 25, 2013

    hi sir,

    can i do this in the windows xp by connecting the fresh copy of hd without the os and remove the gpt and can install windows please reply me sir pls

    my mail id vincentjayakumar.a@gmail.com

  780. Graham Bethell June 28, 2013

    yes

  781. retrostar July 20, 2013

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

  782. DarkStyle July 21, 2013

    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!

  783. marsho August 9, 2013

    thanks sir

  784. SK August 11, 2013

    Thank you.
    Precise and concise.
    Perfect.

  785. Diego Raphael August 12, 2013

    Man…
    I <3 U

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

  786. mwangala August 21, 2013

    This works better and faster than magic. Thanks a zillion.

  787. Leon September 2, 2013

    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.

  788. brill September 13, 2013

    just to add – brilliant :). Even after all these years… Thank you

  789. Anoymous September 13, 2013

    Thank you very for this helpful insight. I worked very well!

  790. Matt September 18, 2013

    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.

  791. Rob October 2, 2013

    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!!!

  792. Rob October 2, 2013

    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!!!

  793. Lucky The Cat October 17, 2013

    Thanks for curing the pain in my ass

  794. tareq October 23, 2013

    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 ?

  795. Geoff October 25, 2013

    Thanks so much for this solution. It worked like a dream for me!

  796. reyy October 29, 2013

    Thanx for ur help..most appreciated

  797. Aakash December 11, 2013

    After executing clean command the data will also be deleted?

  798. Gautier December 12, 2013

    Merci beaucoup ! C’est une réussite totale !

  799. Paul Gu December 15, 2013 — Post Author

    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……..

  800. auris December 20, 2013

    thanks x 1000000 you are genius 🙂

  801. Dax December 28, 2013

    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!

  802. NTx December 30, 2013

    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!

  803. Jilmax February 5, 2014

    Thanks..
    You saved me a2tb drive.

  804. joe February 8, 2014

    Thank you – a long night of frustration before i found your excellent guide. 😀

  805. Martin arvidsson February 27, 2014

    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?

  806. WBurks April 17, 2014

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

  807. Hladeira May 8, 2014

    Great Post.

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

    Thank you!

  808. R'Kennedy June 9, 2014

    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

  809. bogey62 June 26, 2014

    Thank you. Very helpful.

  810. marc July 16, 2014

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

  811. Ivan July 22, 2014

    THANK YOU, You saved my day, week, month, no LIFE :- )

  812. Khadar August 20, 2014

    THANKS FROM ETHIOPIA

  813. travel umroh jakarta August 23, 2014

    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!

  814. Wirenutt September 30, 2014

    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!

  815. Mikey lg October 4, 2014

    OMG thanks so much… even after WD said it couldn’t be done…. again THANK YOU

  816. weight loss tips for teens October 10, 2014

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  817. HaZZarDaZZle October 14, 2014

    Worked like a charm. Thanks!

  818. John Davis October 25, 2014

    Thanks..
    You saved my 2 tb drive and a lot of frustration.

  819. Attila Vicha October 30, 2014

    Thanks!
    You save my day.

  820. Nealstar November 12, 2014

    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.

  821. Carlito December 6, 2014

    A million thanks! it worked!!

  822. anon December 14, 2014

    Thanks! Worked when formatting a hard drive that was previously in a Mac.

  823. Nikos December 27, 2014

    Thank you a ton. You made my life easier.

  824. Kamal December 28, 2014

    Good.. Tq

  825. Mario K January 1, 2015

    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 !

  826. Big V January 2, 2015

    Yes!

  827. mk January 10, 2015

    Worked like a charm!!! Thanks 1000!

  828. eskrim February 6, 2015

    thx a million

  829. Sean February 16, 2015

    So many thanks, well have another, been looking for days.

    Thanks

  830. Sean February 16, 2015

    So many thanks, well have another, been looking for days.

    Tthhaannkkss

  831. julius March 4, 2015

    thank you 😀

  832. RAHUL March 10, 2015

    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.

  833. samuvel March 10, 2015

    Thank’s

  834. Antonios March 30, 2015

    Thanks brother !!! Very good and simple !

  835. Linn April 2, 2015

    Thanks a lot

  836. Nii Kofi * April 18, 2015

    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
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    Polym’s earning ideas

    Comment

  837. Slave April 29, 2015

    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!!!

  838. Pditty May 22, 2015

    Thanks a million….. works in windows 8.1…

  839. the analyzer May 25, 2015

    Thanks for the post. Still helpful in 2015

  840. Nero James May 31, 2015

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

  841. Lolyman June 23, 2015

    THANKS A LOT MAN! THIS GUIDE WAS REALLY HELPFUL TO ME!!

  842. KAPIL K. DEV August 8, 2015

    THANKS

  843. Matt August 15, 2015

    7 years old and still excellent advice. works perfect. thanks for posting

  844. ABCDGF August 20, 2015

    Thanks for this information it saved me a lot of time,
    Thanks again a 1000 x.

  845. Babu Joseph September 4, 2015

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

  846. Marius October 6, 2015

    nice work …

  847. ivan November 28, 2015

    Thanks. A simple sollution.

  848. Carl August 2, 2016

    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…

  849. Assis Meny August 30, 2016

    Thank you Sir
    Helped me alot
    God Bless you!

  850. SK October 7, 2016

    Thanks a lot

  851. wizkid18 November 2, 2016

    Where is your donate Button?

    It is to me worth something !!!

    Thanks

  852. adrian February 21, 2017

    Really thanks man! World needs more people like You!

  853. george March 6, 2017

    Where is your donate Button?

    Thanks a lot Sir 🙂

  854. maydueravo August 2, 2017

    thank you…God Bless You

  855. David Shultz August 27, 2017

    This is so ‘what the Doctor Ordered’ Worked like a charm!

  856. John Nozum September 1, 2017

    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

  857. Milan April 16, 2018

    thanks, you saved my day

  858. Michaela Vergin June 3, 2018

    Thanks for this information.This is second time i am reading this.

  859. Carel Schilp August 28, 2018

    Hello Paul,

    Thanks a lot for the procedure, it worked perfectly.

    Regards, Carl from Holland.

  860. Paul Gu February 25, 2020 — Post Author

    Thank you all for the support, and hope this continues to benefit you all.

  861. cris December 27, 2020

    nice.. thank you so much this process are still working..

  862. Nizam January 25, 2022

    Worked for me too. Thanks a lot!

  863. Yoav May 1, 2022

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

  864. andrewfelixrose September 26, 2022

    Lol this just saved me like 14 years later. Thanks bud.

  865. Paul Gu January 3, 2024 — Post Author

    I can’t believe this is still helping others!

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