How common is 'advanced format' now?

[taltamir]

No you can't. The MBR partitioning scheme allows for 32-bit addressing, 32-bit of 512-byte sectors means 2TiB limit. Beyond that, there is nothing to access using MBR. So you cannot create any partitions beyond the 2TiB barrier. Creating multiple partitions to exceed the 2TiB barrier will therefore not work.

You either should not use partitions at all, which is only possible under non-Windows OS, or you have to use GPT partitions. The problem here is that you need BIOS support which can boot from GPT partitions and Windows also needs to support GPT boot; not sure which versions support it but i do know some only allow storage but not booting from GPT disks.

So the 2TiB barrier is not that easy to circumvent. One possibility is to use 4096 sectors, but to my knowledge, for that to work you need a drive that exposes 4096 byte sectors not like the WD EARS drives which still say they have 512 byte sectors. With 4K sectors you would have 8 times the storage capacity; or 16TiB.

thank you for clarifying.

 

[RebateMonger]

32-bit OS should be able to use GPT; i can't think of any reason it wouldn't. It's not like 32-bit OS cannot handle numbers bigger than 32 bits; they would use two 'words' and get 64-bit.

The "problem" is that you can't BOOT to a GPT-partitioned disk unless you are using 64-bit Windows. That's because you need a UEFI-compliant motherboard to boot to the GPT partition, and 32-bit Windows (of any variety) can't quite handle this. Reportedly, it's a problem with the type of UEFI support in 32-bit Windows.

So, booting to a disk containing GPT partitions can be problematic. Butyou can boot to a MBR disk, you can attach GPT disks as data disks to Vista, Win7, and several versions of Windows Server.

 

[sub.mesa]

Alright but let's keep Windows-specific limitations and limitations that apply to science apart. There is no reason a 32-bit OS cannot boot from GPT; virtually all non-Windows OS can. But Windows 32-bit versions, even windows 7, still cannot boot from GPT.

Also, Windows appears not to support hybrid MBR/GPT configurations. These configurations make booting GPT possible without requiring BIOS EFI support at all; though technically you would be booting from a MBR partition.