Format a HD above 30GB

Stoner

Lads this is the last question i'll ask for the rest of the month ,
anyway, I was wondering how to format a drive in FAT32 above 30 GB. I have XP pro and it wont let me format the drive (120GB) into a partition above 30 GB. I have a hard drive dvd burner that you buy minus a hard drive, they sell with 80 GB in them elsewhere. The drive has to have a fat32 format yet wondows xp pro wont let me format above 30 GB.
Anyone know what i need???

thanks again

stoner

Lump

Why do you want to use Fat?

NTFS is better and win XP preferes it.

John

Esel

Lump wrote:

Why do you want to use Fat?

NTFS is better and win XP preferes it.

John

Because, as the OP said, "The drive has to have a fat32 format".

Chalk

fat32 goes to 2tB, no?
try a windows98 boot disk and use fdisk from it if xp is being whiney

sceptre

Chalk wrote:

fat32 goes to 2tB, no?

Aye. XP and win2k won't format a fat32 partition of greater then 32GB though - Microsoft like it that way (partly due to potential space wastage when going over 32GB as the cluster size doubles from 16k to 32k but mostly because they want you to use their NTFS and they like it that way). They'll happily read one greater than 32GB but given that the OP isn't using it in a PC after formatting it this wouldn't be a problem anyway.

try a windows98 boot disk and use fdisk from it if xp is being whiney

Handiest solution imho. Do that.

If this wasn't going in a HD/DVD recorder where the drive had to be formatted as FAT32 you'd be nuts to want to do this but as you say, has to be done. You'll get a win98 boot disk from here. Obviously you're limited to a 4GB size for a single file on the hard disc (limitation of fat32)

Stoner

Thanks lads i'll do that,

your all correct I'm being forced down the FAT32 road, says so in the manual, tried to ignore it but NTFS gave back a "No Disk Present "