Windows XP & LArge Hard Drives

How can I read larger hard drives with Windows XP either through sata or usb?

 

Unless the drive manufacturer provides some sort of "extended capacity manager" like Seagate once upon a time did, or have some sort of chip or brain in the external drive's firmware, chances are you will NOT be able to detect or use any drive over 2 TB in capacity.

I had purchased an eternal seagate hard drive that was 3TB in size and guaranteed it could be viewed from any 32-bit OS, and it worked. I suspect in the case of the external drive it was due to a controller built into the drive dock of the external enclosure.

I have a newer Seagate HDD that's got 8TB of space, and my XP 32-bit cannot view it. My XP 64 can.

 

What if I run XP as a virtual machine, would I still only see 2gb of any drive?

Would I be best to run XP64 even with my XP32 bit programs I need to run?

I am at a catch 22 with a old computer I wanted to upgrade and a ne computer that won't run XP and my programs won't run on Win10.

Kinda need a suggestion as to best way to go.

 

XP 64 is the way to go based on what you're trying to do.

XP 32 in a virtual machine will have the same issues. However, the work around would be mapping a "shared folder" from the host OS to the guest OS.

 

use old hdd from a sky box 500gb either as main drive or buy external case work well on xp

 

Ok so here it what I have done so far. I setup a virtual machine with Virtual Box and installed WinXP. Install went great with the help of some videos on YouTube. Now I will map a shared folder from host os to the guest os or just partition my 4gb hard drive in partitions of 2gb or less.

 

There's a couple of different ways around this problem. One is to use a NAS that can have much larger drives than 2TB.

The other is to use 4kn sectored drives. The western digital easystores are capable of being converted to 4kn through a wd program and then because the sectors are 4096 bytes versus 512 bytes, you can have a much larger drive (up to 16TB I think) natively in xp. You still can't exceed 2TB for fat32 partitions unless you want to use some tricks, but otherwise it works well. I have 2x 14TB easystore drives with mbr partitions of 7x 2TB fat32 volumes. And xp, win7+, and even nas units recognize it.