I then boot back into WinPE 3 and I check with diskpart and the two partitions are there and Part 1 is active. I cleaned the disk in diskpart in WinPE 3, then reboot into DOS and run the Grub commands from before. Because you said this is for OS that doesn't support GPT, then I can test with Windows 7 Pro SP1 x86, which does not support GPT or EFI booting.

I have also changed to an older motherboard, the Intel D410PT with 2GB RAM. Diskpart there lets you create a partition without automatically converting the disk.

With a smaller disk, it does not convert to GPT. (we do have a few ways to boot a GPT disk on BIOS, if the OS supports GPT, like Windows 7 and later).ĭiskpart in WinPE 4, 5 and 10 will automatically convert the 3TB disk to GPT if not initialized. In any case - re-thinking about this - all in all the experiment makes no real sense (making it with Windows 7 which already supports GPT), it makes sense for those OS's that know nothing about GPT. the Start LBA of the LAST needs to be less than 2^32-1=4294967295 sectors and the amount of sectors in this last partition does not exceed 2^32-1=4294967295

More generally, the test is not about two partitions, it is about n partitions, with the ONLY requisite that the very last partition starts within the 2.2 Tb limit and does not extend for more than the same 2.2 Tb, i.e. Once you have a single partition working (and booting) normally, and the unallocated portion at the end, all is needed is to create the second partition (it is possible that the first partition needs to be slightly shrinked in order to have the first LBA sector of the second partition within the 2.2 Tb limit. If your 'normal' process worked on a 3 Tb+ disk (in the past), by all means do that. Maybe it is not the diskpart (or whatever) that *automatically* converts to GPT but something else in your process. You clearly need a PE (and a diskpart) from Windows 7 or earlier (and as said earlier the whole point is about using a 32 bit OS).

Well, of course if the disk is converted *automatically* to GPT, then it won't ever boot in BIOS.

Wincontig the volume does not have