GPT Protective Partitions and Windows XP

I upgraded the hard disks in the mac pro to 1 gig models and put the 500mb old drives to use, one as a time machine for the macbook, another in the media center and the third as a 'clone' drive to backup the last XP box called Gamera.

The idea is to automatically clone the xp system disk in case of failure. The document files are stored on the network but re-installing windows and it's application is not a welcome chore.

The problem was that XP could not format the mac osx drive. It listed it as a GPT Protected Partition but could not access it. I booted the Gparted liveCD which listed the drive and seemed to allow me to change the partition to NTFS but when i rebooted into XP it was still locked into GPT.

The solution was to drop into the windows terminal or CLI by running cmd. At the command prompt type:

diskpart

to run the disk partition utility. You can now list your disks, select a disk and clean it up. In this case we see there are 4 disks, disk 0 being the XP system disk and disk 1 being the osx disk.

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ---------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 466 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 466 GB 0 B
Disk 2 Online 699 GB 0 B
Disk 3 Online 932 GB 0 B

DISKPART> select Disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

Once the disk is cleaned, then run control panel, administrative tools. computer management, disk management.

This brings up the disk initialization wizard which allows you to select disk 1 and to format it as NTFS. The disk now shows up correctly as sys (G:) 465.76 gb NTFS.

The next step is to find a windows version of the great osx utility - carbon copy cloner. The requirements are:

- creates an exact copy of the system disk including boot data and permissions
- updates the duplicate disk automatically on a schedule
- open source or non-proprietary


I think DriveImage might work but first we download XXclone. It's pretty simple, you can set the backup drive to be bootable and then copy all the files. It also has an incremental copy option.

Next we run DriveImage XML which is free for personal use. It has a backup option but also a drive to drive copy. We decide to test copying c: to g: which will take some time...