XP and formatting hDD's?

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Tue Mar 05, 2002 10:43 pm

There any way to format a partition in XP to fat32... I got pissed at win2k after i crashed it so just loaded XP on this server... I formatted the 5 gig side with fat32 when i loaded it but now that XP is loaded and i'm in it it only gives me the NTFS option for the 75 gig side... I don't want NTFS on this any way to get it to format fat32?

Jim Z · Post by **Jim Z** » Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:39 pm

Go to Disk Management, right click on the partition, select "format", and the box that pops up should give you the option of NTFS or FAT32. I just tried it here and that's what happened.

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:46 pm

Just tried ti here thats how i was trying to format it... gives me the fat32 ntfs option for c drive(5 gig) but for d drive(75 Gig) i only get the ntfs option why i don't know tried formatting it with the cd like i wa sgonna install it and it only gave me the NTFS option to...

RubberDuckie · Post by **RubberDuckie** » Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:54 pm

for some reason WinXP will not let you format a HDD larger then 32Gigs with anything but NTFS.
If you partition it into smaller drives you can do FAT32...or boot into DOS and format it there.
I keep a win98 CD around and boot from that and fromat there.

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Wed Mar 06, 2002 12:11 am

I tried the win98 dos thing also.. . It would only pick up the d partition as being lil over 5 megs which i knew wasn't right... oh well i got tired of messin' with it just formatted with NTFS i have too much stuff on my hdd that i need to clean out and put on the server...

dadx2mj · Post by **dadx2mj** » Wed Mar 06, 2002 12:47 am

Pretty sure FAT32 is limited to 32gigs. So you either have to break it down to smaller partions or use NTFS.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Mar 06, 2002 1:12 am

Doc Silly answered this in another thread. XP and Win2K both have an ARTIFICIAL limit of 32Gb.

In reality FAT32 can go up to around 120Gb.

It's an artificial limit MS installed in 2K & XP to force you to use NTFS.

HOWEVER, Win2K/XP have no problem accessing an EXISTING FAT32 partition larger than 32Gb.

The simple workaround is to boot with a Win98 boot disk and FDISK the partition to whatever size you want and format it, then boot into XP and have fun.