xp hard drive size limit

woofercooker · 10 Jun 2014 at 15:37

Is it true i can only use 2tb drives in xp? Is there any way around this?

snips86x · 10 Jun 2014 at 15:39

Upgrade to Windows 7 or use a 64bit OS!

woofercooker · 10 Jun 2014 at 15:44

Without upgrading lol? Im on a budget and using a fairly old comp for media purposes which it still does well but need more storage and only have space for 2 drives in my case + it has usb 2.0 which is too slow to stream some HD stuff from an external drive.

s452 · 10 Jun 2014 at 15:45

with 3TB+ HDDs, theres also a hardware factor to take into account, motherboards from around sandybridge or earlier may not recognise 3TB+ HDDs correctly without a bios update or similar, normally showing them as smaller than what they should be

Quartz · 10 Jun 2014 at 15:53

You shouldn't be using XP any more, but the limitation is not so much XP as the formatting scheme it supports: MBR. GPT drives can exceed 2 TB and a company called Paragon made a driver for Windows XP. I can't see it on their website, though.

woofercooker · 10 Jun 2014 at 15:57

Hmm I take it there is no limit tho on how many single 2tb drives you can use? I have the old antec fusion media case which only has space for 2 drives i think i could squeeze one in just in front of the psu but i would have to somehow find a way to secure it which is a bit of a ball ache but i supposed worst case i could give it a go.

Only reason im still with XP is just because it does everything i need, i only use it as a media rig and for playing old school games, Genuinely have no reason to upgrade yet but really do need some more storage!

woofercooker · 10 Jun 2014 at 16:13

Is it possible to partition a 4tb drive into 2 2x 2tb in XP?

rpstewart · 10 Jun 2014 at 18:16

woofercooker said:
Is it possible to partition a 4tb drive into 2 2x 2tb in XP?

No.

A drive can only have one partition table. An MBR partition table only has enough address space to deal with 2.2Tb of space.

C.R.A.Z.Y · 1 Jul 2014 at 13:40

rpstewart said:
No.

A drive can only have one partition table. An MBR partition table only has enough address space to deal with 2.2Tb of space.

Internally and natively in XP correct, however if you use a 3/4TB external USB HDD then windows XP can have MBR partitions greater than 2.2TB.

My advice is if you want 3 or 4TB hdd's running on XP and don't want to have to buy extra software then just grab USB externals (they are cheaper anyway)

bledd · 1 Jul 2014 at 13:46

Buy Windows 8.1 or use Linux.

^Short answer

C.R.A.Z.Y · 1 Jul 2014 at 13:50

Cheapest answer is like I said and buy USB hard drives as they bypass the 2TiB MBR issue in XP. Just make sure you don't delete the partition in Disk Management as this will remove this XP workaround
(A full format is fine though and strongly advised on ANY new drive)