Cannot Delete a GPT Disk in Windows XP - February 9, 2009
I recently formatted some external drives in Vista and then moved them to an XP machine where they would not mount. When I went to reformat them in XP, I found that I could not format the disks at all. The disk management tool (control panel->administrative tools->computer management->disk management) listed them as “GPT protected” and would not allow me to erase them.
The solution was to use the command line tool “diskpart” to clean the disk so it could be formatted like normal in XP.
1) start->run->cmd
2) diskpart
3) list disk
4) select disk # (select disk 4 for example)
5) clean
6) exit
Now the disk will be available to format using the Disk Management tool.