How to switch your Seagate Exos X16 to 4KN Advanced Format on Windows

WARNING: Currently this is broken, issue reported to Seagate.

1 – Download Seachest Lite from here.

2 – Open Computer Management and delete the existing partition on the drive you want to convert from 512 to 4KN Advanced Format

3 – Open a command prompt with Admin rights, and run the seachest lite with the following command to identify the drives:

SeaChest_Lite_x64_windows.exe -s

4 – Run SeaChest_Lite_x64_windows.exe -d PD2 --showSupportedFormats on your target disk to confirm its running with 512

5 – Run the following command to switch to 4096

SeaChest_Lite_x64_windows.exe -d PD2 --setSectorSize 4096 --confirm this-will-erase-data

6 – Wait for a few minutes for it to finish, and shut down your PC afterwards (reboot likely also work)

7 – ISSUE: Open computer management again, and the drive comes back with a corrupted partition, which is not possible to remove:

Reported issue to Seagate under here.

EDIT: As I reported on Github, there is a workaround. Right after deleting the existing partition on step 2, you can convert the disk to MBR:

This allowed me to proceed (computer still froze first time I tried to convert back to GPT, but after all, success!



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Categorized as Misc

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