Disable GTP Disk's "Partition protection" so you can move HDDs between computers.

Question

Disable GTP Disk's "Protective partition" so you can move disks between computers.

Pretty much as the subject head lines says.

I would like to have this protection disabled by default so Windows do not create protected HDD's (Or SSD's for that matter), which is very hard to move another rig.

How do you disable the default "partition protection" that is enabled by default on HDDs which makes it impossible to take HDD and move it to another workstation, server or add into a External USB casing/conector?

As it is right now as you guys already probably know it is impossible to move a HDD from one computer to another because when you add it to the other PC the HDD is displayed as "protected partition" and you cannot do anything with it. Not even delete the old partition or extract the data from it without having to mess around wit the command prompt and diskpart.exe. There is tons of threads out there on the internet with desperate people attempting to access their HDD's with varying success or fail rate.

We have a few computers in our company mostly Windows 10 and and some servers one of them is a older local file server with Windows 2003 Enterprise server running on it with quite a few large TB disks attached to it.

So I'm quite keen to figure out how one can disable this default behavior so that we can get around this issue from the start when we swap disks / add new ones etc.

I would appreciate if there is a way to do this both for Windows 10/11 but also for servers 2003 and Windows Server 2022 too if possible.

(Please do not start ranting about that we should upgrade our older 2003 server machine and that is dangerous to run it etc. etc. We know and heard all the arguments, and we do have our reasons why we use it. Thank you).

Thanks in advance
Kind regards

***moved from Windows / Other/Unknown / Devices and drivers***

Answer 1

Hi Li0nKing,

The GPT Protective Partition is used to protect the GPT disk from being overwritten by older software that only recognizes Master Boot Record (MBR) partitions. In a GPT disk, the protective MBR is located at the beginning of the disk (LBA 0). It contains a single partition entry that covers the entire disk, making it appear as if the disk is fully utilized.

If you still want to use this disk, you have to clean the disk and initialize it again. Open CMD as administrator and run diskpart.exe, then run the following commands

list disk
select disk 0
clean

Then open Disk Management to initialize and format the disk again.

Please note that this will cause data loss so backup data before any operation.

Answer 2

Hallo Li0nKing,

Die GPT-Schutzpartition wird verwendet, um die GPT-Festplatte vor dem Überschreiben durch ältere Software zu schützen, die nur MBR-Partitionen (Master Boot Record) erkennt. Bei einer GPT-Festplatte befindet sich der schützende MBR am Anfang der Festplatte (LBA 0). Es enthält einen einzelnen Partitionseintrag, der die gesamte Festplatte abdeckt, so dass es so aussieht, als ob die Festplatte vollständig genutzt wird.

Wenn Sie diese Festplatte weiterhin verwenden möchten, müssen Sie die Festplatte reinigen und erneut initialisieren. Öffnen Sie CMD als Administrator, führen Sie diskpart.exe aus und führen Sie dann die folgenden Befehle aus:

list disk
select disk 0
clean

Öffnen Sie dann die Datenträgerverwaltung, um die Festplatte erneut zu initialisieren und zu formatieren.

Bitte beachten Sie, dass dies zu Datenverlust führen kann, also sichern Sie die Daten vor jedem Vorgang.

hallo ich stehe vor dem gleichen Problem auf meinem win server habe ich auch eine hdd mit einer geschützten gpt partion leider kann ich nicht auf die daten in dieser Partition zugreifen und diese dürfen nicht gelöscht werden aber sichern kann ich diese auch nicht weil ich ja keinen zugriff habe

ich suche eine gute idee, können sie mir bitte weiterhelfen

viele dank schonmal vorab

Answer 3

Hi Li0nKing,

The GPT Protective Partition is used to protect the GPT disk from being overwritten by older software that only recognizes Master Boot Record (MBR) partitions. In a GPT disk, the protective MBR is located at the beginning of the disk (LBA 0). It contains a single partition entry that covers the entire disk, making it appear as if the disk is fully utilized.

If you still want to use this disk, you have to clean the disk and initialize it again. Open CMD as administrator and run diskpart.exe, then run the following commands

list disk
select disk 0
clean

Then open Disk Management to initialize and format the disk again.

Please note that this will cause data loss so backup data before any operation.

Thank you. This helped so much. I was on the verge of returning a used HDD I had bought. By the way, the HDD is showing Lifetime hours of 89076 hours. Can I keep using it? SMART data show pre failure