I understand that in order to get my HDD to work with WinXP I need to make the partition table MBR.
In order to utilize the whole 5tb of space, I need the logical and physical byte per sector to be 4096.
However, my WD Elements is 512e i.e. showing 512 logical and 4096 physical.
Several users have reported success with WD Quickformatter when running under compatibility mode for win7 and selecting “XP Compatible” option. (it changed the hdd for them from 512e to 4Kn and therefore allowed to overcome the MBR 2TB limit)
The WD instructions Show the same scenario: How to Format an External Drive Using WD Quick Formatter
However, no matter what I do I can’t get the option to choose between factory default or xp compatible.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: Just minutes after posting this I found my solution.
I found an older version of WD Quickformatter and suddenly the XP compatibility option was there.
I now have a 4Kn HDD which allows me to bypass the 2tb limit on MBR AND FAT32.
Suggestion for WD: Make a user friendly program that allows “us users” to convert between 512e and 4Kn. Since you already have the technology in place, compiling the program should be easy and would give you an advantage over the competition since AFAIK no one else offers that service.
