So I swapped out the old 4TB drive inside that Seagate case with my new 8TB one, using the same connector bridge, and… hey, presto, my XP system is happy with its new 8TB hard drive!
However, in the old days WD, Seagate (and others) got round that by including a cunning little chip in the “bridge” hardware in their external hard drive cases that fooled XP into thinking that 4MB clusters were 512K clusters and, well, short version is it allowed XP systems to see bigger volumes - like my 4TB drive that was failing. I wanted a new drive to work on an old 32-bit Windows XP operating system, and as many people have discovered, XP can’t see hard drives bigger than 2.1TB. I confirm it works on both the older 107C Element drives from 2015 and the current 2017 model Element which is the 25A3. Please note I have tested this on the rounded My Books and confirm it works, but I have not tested the rectangular My Books. If you removed the drive and put it into your computer it would not be recognized. Obviously, the external enclosure is needed for a 4TB MBR partition. The USB interface still contains the emulation needed for XP, even though WD now defaults to a GPT partition. I then connect it to my XP machine and I can read and write to the the full 4TB partition, no extra software needed. I select XP Compatible in the format options and it creates a single 4TB MBR partition. To make the 4TB drive XP compatible, I connect it to a Windows 7 machine and format with the WD utility. But the current My Book and Elements (model 25A3) have a GPT partition and need to be reformatted to work with XP. The older 4TB My Book and Elements (model 107C) used to come with a MBR partition. I am an XP user and can say that the 4TB My Book and Element drives are still working with XP.
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