Gpt to mbr conversion

I bought several used Hitachi 500 gb drives that are GPT. I plan to use these on Win XP 64 bit machines.Although they accept data and function well, I cannot find a way to format them into MBR drives that I can boot using xp. I even tried installing windows xp as a new install, and I geta message that it can’t install to a GPT drive. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Use AOMEI.  Best hard drive tech out there, it will sort you out.

Welcome to the Community.

You can write zeros using Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics to destroy the partition table and re-initialize the hard drives as MBR. However, I am not aware if this application supports Hitachi drives since it’s WD-specific. 

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1211/

I would use free DBAN (dban.org) to wipe the disk (use a single pass of writing zeros which takes about 1.5 hours for 500GB). This will wipe the entire drive. Then you can use Windows to partition the drive as MBR.

By the way, you don’t need an external dock for the above. Just connect the drive internally via SATA, power on, place the DBAN disc in the drive, reboot, and DBAN will start. The online instructions are fairly straight-forward.

Ah, it seems that there are only a few people still using XP, so it may be a little difficult to find solutions for Win XP pc problems. Furthermore, people usually convert their mbr disks to gpt style, few the vice versa. Luckily, I recently passed by a third party software which supports converting gpt disk to mbr in XP OS. Maybe it’s your luck!

Trancer for some reason I am unable to reply to your PM, however the software I mentioned IS free, so doesn’t break your rules. My apologies for not pointing this out.