PCA Forums

I helped a friend out installing winxp, and during the setup where we partition and format the drive, xp made his 80 gig drive only 32 gigs in size. Can this be overcome by some options during install, or am I better off using Partition Magic to partition and format the drive?

Did you select to format the drive with FAT32? WinXP will only create/format new partitions with FAT32 up to 32GB (though it does support bigger FAT32 partitions). It is a builtin limitation from M$ to push NTFS forward. You'll have to use something else if you want the whole 80GB with FAT32, like a Win98 bootdisk.

Or just format it in NTSF. No reason not to anymore.

If you've already done the WinXP install in the 32Gb partition then you can use Partition Magic to enlarge it.

Or you could just use WinXP's disk manager to format the remaining space as a 2nd partition.