Read GPT hard disk on Windows XP

[Dave-H]

No problem, here it is!

I'm pretty certain that the drivers came on the CD that goes with the motherboard (Supermicro X7DAL-E+).
The board, which is a server board, is from 2009 so would have been designed for Windows Server 2003 I would have thought.

[Dixel]

8 hours ago, Dave-H said:

The board, which is a server board, is from 2009 so would have been designed for Windows Server 2003 I would have thought.

Most likely - Server 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008

[Dave-H]

Possibly, although I've always assumed that the actual design work for the board would have been done before Server 2008 was released.
Anyway, it works fine with XP and 10, although Windows 98 was a bit more of a struggle to get working properly on it!
Windows 11 works fine on it too, although not officially of course.

[D.Draker]

16 hours ago, Dave-H said:

Possibly, although I've always assumed that the actual design work for the board would have been done before Server 2008 was released.
Anyway, it works fine with XP and 10, although Windows 98 was a bit more of a struggle to get working properly on it!
Windows 11 works fine on it too, although not officially of course.

I have a similar Xeon Board from 2009. It was sold with the first edition of Server 2008. Server 2008 was issued to OEM sales on January 2008.

Server 2003 and XP64 had some odd behaviour with the C-states of Xeon CPUs. I had to force C1 state only, and the issues were gone.

[Milkinis]

 has anyone turned a 512e sectors disk into 4Kn disk with HUGO ? is it stable this procedure ?

Edited April 15 by Milkinis

[user57]

i could write assembly or c++ to a firmware

but i think i need a drive to test 

[Andalu]

@Dave-H

I tried the Paragon driver on my MSI Q87M board, which has the option of selecting either IDE or AHCI mode in the BIOS.

 

As I feared, I got confirmation that the GPT Loader allows recognition of GPT disks in XP only in IDE mode:

while that driver fails when AHCI mode is selected. Here is the image for the GPT Loader installed on the same MSI Q87M board:

Unfortunately, more modern components do not always allow better possibilities (and in some aspects not even better performance).

 

[Andalu]

15 hours ago, Milkinis said:

 has anyone turned a 512e sectors disk into 4Kn disk with HUGO ? is it stable this procedure ?

I have never tried and I think I am unlikely to do so, both because I do not have a compatible drive and because I think it is preferable to avoid the risk of ending up with a damaged hard drive.

[Andalu]

14 hours ago, user57 said:

i could write assembly or c++ to a firmware

but i think i need a drive to test 

I did not understand what you are referring to. Could you please explain further?

 

[user57]

well i dont know what this firmware is written at

but even if it would be a pure assembly code i certainly can change that code to all of the needs

i suspect for the firmware a c/c++ (there are some differences in these but they are not big and i know them too) , combined with some assembly code

 

i certainly can understand those codes and change them , but its something to read into - i dont know all the disc norms 

 

but thats something a programmer can do 

i was involved in chrome gdi, supermium, llvm,sumatra pdf or that heic image encoder

to say the least it took some time to read into that codec, but the code i actually understand

https://msfn.org/board/topic/185879-winxp-hevcheifheic-image-encoderdecoder/#comment-1254293

 

[Andalu]

@user57

More than firmware, I think it is a driver question, as for the Paragon GPT Loader mentioned above.

In this case, it would be a matter of modifying the driver so that it recognizes GPT disks even in motherboards that have only the SATA/AHCI option in the BIOS, as in the case of older ones that also provide IDE mode, for which such a driver seems to work without problems even when the data written exceeds the 2.2 TB limit as reported above by @aoresteen (I have not yet tested).

Could you do that?

[user57]

well that with the GPT might be wrong idea in this case

the idea was for a MBR with bigger sectors - even tho the title was supposed for reading the GPT partition

 

GPT has not really a use except the higher possible disc space

the idea that came around was just to increase the MBR sectors, the boot or read of GPT partition would be a different question then

 

that paragon driver is made from a public driver, but it dont increase the MBR sectors

that driver probaly emulates a next disc, where that driver makes read and writes 

 

if the windows driver really cant do that only then a driver change would be needed

[Dave-H]

2 hours ago, Andalu said:

@Dave-H

I tried the Paragon driver on my MSI Q87M board, which has the option of selecting either IDE or AHCI mode in the BIOS.

 

As I feared, I got confirmation that the GPT Loader allows recognition of GPT disks in XP only in IDE mode:

while that driver fails when AHCI mode is selected. Here is the image for the GPT Loader installed on the same MSI Q87M board:

Unfortunately, more modern components do not always allow better possibilities (and in some aspects not even better performance).

 

Where did gptmount.sys come from?
My Paragon driver is GPT_Loader.sys.

[roytam1]

12 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

Where did gptmount.sys come from?
My Paragon driver is GPT_Loader.sys.

I think it is from https://dl.bloba.dev/Operating Systems/Windows/Windows XP/Windows XP Professional SP3 x86 - Integral Edition 2022.6.16/Extras/Paragon GPT Loader v8.0.1.2/

[Andalu]

52 minutes ago, user57 said:

well that with the GPT might be wrong idea in this case

the idea was for a MBR with bigger sectors - even tho the title was supposed for reading the GPT partition

 

GPT has not really a use except the higher possible disc space

the idea that came around was just to increase the MBR sectors, the boot or read of GPT partition would be a different question then

 

that paragon driver is made from a public driver, but it dont increase the MBR sectors

that driver probaly emulates a next disc, where that driver makes read and writes 

 

if the windows driver really cant do that only then a driver change would be needed

According to the thread title, here we are talking about GPT disks to be recognized in XP in order to have more data space available than the 2.2TB MBR limit and to have the possibility to use the same disks in operating systems later than XP.

I have not yet thoroughly tested the Paragon driver but from the minimum I have been able to observe it does not seem to emulate any other disk.

I have tried all the sata/ahci drivers known so far to be compatible with XP and with none of them does the Paragon driver allow recognition of GPT disks.