External Hard Drive problem

marcusb

Hi all,

I've got a 750GB external seagate. It was NTFS formatted when i got it but i wanted to change that to FAT32.

I downloaded the program Swissknife and followed these steps;

Deleted existing partition.
Selected FAT32 and formatted drive.

Now this changed it to FAT32 alright, but now when i go into my computer and check the disk it tells me that it's only 200GB in size.

I've tried to format it back to NTFS through disk management, and that looked to work. Sort of.




So even though i tried to format it back, it's still FAT32, but the computer recognises that it's 698.63 GB in one place, but also thinks it's only 196.56GB??

Any ideas?

Gone West

Get your local computer whizzkid to sort it for you man...

Anti

Reads this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32

marcusb

Manties wrote: »

Reads this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32

Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size, but the format program included in Windows 2000 and higher can only create FAT32 file systems of 32 GB or less. This limitation is by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.[12][16] This limitation can be bypassed by using third-party formatting utilities or by using the built-in FORMAT.EXE command-line utility.


Has my third party formatting utility worked is my question. I was aware that there are some problems with formatting large hard drives into FAT32 and that's why i went with a program 'Swissknife' that seemed to be able to get around this.

marcusb

Solution found.

I downloaded and installed Disk wizard from Seagate's website. Run this program and it will set the hard disk up exactly how you want.

Just in case anyone else gets this problem.