Best way to refomat 5.6 tB drive

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1

On one of my computers , I have a 5.6 TB GID drive formatted as ext4. I’d like to refomat it as ntfs in preparation for switching this particular computer from opensuse 15.1 to windows 10. In YAST the partitioning option has no ntfs formattingg option. Whats the best way for me to proceed?

2

If it were me, I would let the Windows 10 installer format it.

3

Yeah, there’s still no linux way to do that AFAIK.

4

Will it be able deal with a GID drive?

5

Will it be able deal with a GID drive?

Thanks for your reply.

6

Don’t know why not GPT partitioning (GUID) is standard for drives over 2 gig

7

I assume you mean GPT.

Windows should be able to handle GPT drives. But I don’t know whether it will install to a GPT drive if you are using MBR booting. It should be fine with UEFI booting. And with a drive that large, you probably need UEFI booting to properly handle it.

8

Hello,

Boot from an usb stick with windows iso.
On region and language selection, press shift+F10 to open a terminal.
Use diskpart command.

Type:
diskpart
list disk
select disk (the disk you want)
clean
convert gpt
create partition primary (if you want a single partition)
OR
create partition primary size=“what size you want”
format quick fs=ntfs

9

It’s generally a good idea to let whatever OS will “own” the disk and partitions to do the disk operations.
To prepare the disk or partition, you can use anything to remove the partition… Linux has various utilities like fdisk, parted.
If you don’t prepare the disk by removing the partition using Linux, when MSWindows tries to read the partition, it might show as “Unknown” or it might not show at all (less likely). So, I don’t recommend waiting until later to remove the EXT4 formatted partition, do it while your Linux system can read it.

When you boot to your new OS (Win10 in this case),
You can use the OS’ disk utilities to partition and format, in this case if it’s a data drive Windows will use its “Disk Management” utility.
If you intend to install Windows into the unpartitioned, free space the installer will behave like the openSUSE installer… The free space is found and recommended for the new install.

Technically,
It should be possible for even Linux to format a partition with NTFS (eg has been possible since forever using gparted) but I wouldn’t recommend that… Over the years NTFS has evolved, and the version installed by Linux may not be exactly what your MSWindows wants… So, just let MSWindows format if that’s how you you intend to use the disk space.

HTH,
TSU