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PatrThom, I'm pretty sure this one'll be yours to answer :-P
Anyway: the problem. My girlfriend has somewhat outdated computer; the computer itself will get passed down to someone later on. However, on her hard drive is still quite a bit of data she wants to recover (pictures etc), to the tune of some 50GB. Too much for me to burn it to DVDs, too much to pull it all out over a network...Besides, I'm not really a fan of trying to get a network up and running between Vista, 7, and XP all at the same time, which would be necessary. So, let's not.
I intended to just copy all of the data to my external hard disk, and than sift through it at ease. All perfectly good, except for one small problem: WinXP doesn't mount the drive.
I can plug it in, it'll recognise the drive as a USB storage device, etc etc, but it only detects the protective MBR bit. It doesn't assign my external hard drive a drive letter, or in any other way lets me interact with it. Crud.
Questions:
a) is there a way to get WinXP32 to be able to write to a GPT drive (the answer to this one is no, as far as I've been able to tell)
b) is there a non-overly-complicated way to reformat my external hard drive (or part of it) to MBR temporarily, and make it GPT again afterwards? There's no data on the external hard drive I do'nt have backed up, so that's not a problem...But I want it back exactly the way it was afterwards (format HD -> copy all the old stuff to it -> put all the old stuff on my own PC's hard drive -> reformat HD again -> have HD back in GPT etc).

Graçias.

GPT/MBR(/APM) are things that have to be done drive-wide. You can't make part of a drive MBR and the rest GPT*, nor can you temporarily change it. The partition map isn't like format type (FAT/NTFS). Easiest way would probably be to attach the old drive to your computer, which should read it just fine. Then copy what you want and sift at your leisure.

Otherwise, yes. You can reformat the external drive via the disk management snap-in (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Disk Management) in XP, do your copy, then reformat it again on your machine (presumably in GPT). Note that you didn't say how big your external drive is. If it's larger than 2TB, you will have issues with XP regardless of the partition type. You'd have to cut the disk up into partitions smaller than 2GB for XP to use it.


--Patrick
*Sorta. There's a hybrid. But that's both at the same time and you don't want to deal with it. There is also software which CAN change the partition type on the fly, but it's for OS X. If there is a comparable PC product, I don't know it. Wait, I visited Google. I found some that will go from GPT to MBR, but not the other way, so you'd have to reformat to go back to GPT anyway. Oh, and they aren't free.

External HD is 500 GB, so that's not a problem. I'd attach the HD of her pc to my computer, but mine's a laptop, and hers is a standard built-in drive. I wouldn't know how to go about that - and before you ask, my external HD is 2,5" so I can't open it up and put her drive in there for a while :-P
I'll go about reformatting, thanks for the trouble