Installing Western Digital 2tb hard drive, help?

djabs786 · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:49

I installed the hard drive, and it is recognized the hard drive but its asking me to initialise it, giving me two options - Master boot record or Guid partition table :S.
which 1 should i choose? the hard drive is a 2tb western digitial one. i alredy have another hdd as a boot drive, so this is going to be a secondary drive. thanks

rpstewart · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:50

MBR is fine.

djabs786 · 22 Feb 2011 at 13:51

whats the difference between the two?

DragonQ · 22 Feb 2011 at 14:48

GPT is required for >2 TB, MBR is required for boot drives unless you have UEFI.

rpstewart · 22 Feb 2011 at 15:24

In addition GPT is only recognised by certain OSes so could you could see problems if you move a GPT formatted drive to a different machine without remembering it's GPT.

djabs786 · 22 Feb 2011 at 15:56

so, what option shall i choose? im only going to use the secondary drive for multimedia files, and ill be leaving the first hdd as the boot drive :s guid partition table or master boot record. the secondary hdd will be staying in that desktop. thanks

wonko · 22 Feb 2011 at 17:39

I'd stick with MBR as already advised - no need for anything else.