Osiblog

I accidentally formatted my external harddisk in OSX. Since I wanted this disk to be NTFS I needed it to be formatted in Windows. When I opened up disk management I was unable to format the harddisk because it had a GPT protected partition on it.

Thanks to the instructions of this website I was able to erase the disk and recreate a NTFS partition.

Here is how it works. Goto start -> run and type cmd. Press enter.

c:\windows\system32> diskpart

Excute the following command to show the disks

DISKPART> list disk

Which should output something like:

  Schf ###  Status      Grootte  Vrij     Dyn  GPT
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Schijf 0    On line      149 GB      0 B
  Schijf 1    On line      149 GB      0 B

My external disk was number 1. In order to select this disk I executed:

DISKPART> select disk 1

Now the active disk is marked with an asterisk:

  Schf ###  Status      Grootte  Vrij     Dyn  GPT
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Schijf 0    On line      149 GB      0 B
* Schijf 1    On line      149 GB      0 B

To remove the partition execute:

DISKPART> clean

Now you are able to reformat the disk through Disk Management. Remember to right click on the disk first and choose “Initialize”.

general format, GPT, harddisk, partition