Guest ralphs Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 XP Pro, SP2, current patch level. I have a 74.5 Gig USB drive and went to format it under Disk Management. It only showed NTFS as a selection, no FAT32. Is there a way to coerce XP into formatting as FAT32?
Guest Ken Blake Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 Re: Formatting ralphs wrote: > XP Pro, SP2, current patch level. I have a 74.5 Gig USB drive and > went to format it under Disk Management. It only showed NTFS as a > selection, no FAT32. Is there a way to coerce XP into formatting as > FAT32? No. You can not create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB under Windows XP. However, you *can* create such a partition externally, and Windows XP will happily use it. -- Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User Please reply to the newsgroup
Guest Patrick Keenan Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 Re: Formatting "ralphs" <ralph08260@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:%23DlSohOyHHA.1212@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl... > XP Pro, SP2, current patch level. I have a 74.5 Gig USB drive and went to > format it under Disk Management. It only showed NTFS as a selection, no > FAT32. Is there a way to coerce XP into formatting as FAT32? Only if the partition is under 32 meg or so. Otherwise, you need to use something like Win98 or ME to format it. But you'll need to have a Win9x install or DOS boot disk that can access the USB drive. Is there a reason you need to use FAT32 for this? HTH -pk
Guest Curt Christianson Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 Re: Formatting "Patrick Keenan" <test@dev.null> wrote in message news:%23Pk7NNPyHHA.3916@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl... | Only if the partition is under 32 meg or so. <snipped> I hope that GB's Patrick. Methinks you type too fast ;-) -- HTH, Curt Windows Support Center http://www.aumha.org Practically Nerded,... http://dundats.mvps.org/Index.htm
Guest ralphs Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 Re: Formatting > Is there a reason you need to use FAT32 for this? No compelling reason, just paranoia. NTFS is not documented. If there is a problem on the disk I am at the mercy of chkdsk. With FAT32 you know where the data is and can look at it at a low level.
Guest ralphs Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 Re: Formatting > No. You can not create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB under Windows > XP. > > However, you *can* create such a partition externally, and Windows XP will > happily use it. Ok, thanks. I guess XP is keeping me from having clusters that are too large.
Guest Tim Slattery Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 Re: Formatting "ralphs" <ralph08260@yahoo.com> wrote: >> Is there a reason you need to use FAT32 for this? > >No compelling reason, just paranoia. NTFS is not documented. If there is a >problem on the disk I am at the mercy of chkdsk. With FAT32 you know where >the data is and can look at it at a low level. NTFS is proprietary to a much greater degree than the FAT systems, that's absolutely true. It's also much more robust, MUCH less likely to develop problems, especially with huge partitions. As for documentation, there's an ongoing project to develop NTFS drivers for Linux. Their home page is http://www.linux-ntfs.org Thy have lots of documentation at http://www.linux-ntfs.org/content/view/103/42/ From that page: "The NTFS documentation shows the on-disk format of an NTFS volume. Microsoft Windows NT, 2000 and XP use NTFS, a filesystem resembling a database." -- Tim Slattery MS MVP(DTS) Slattery_T@bls.gov http://members.cox.net/slatteryt
Guest Ken Blake Posted July 18, 2007 Posted July 18, 2007 Re: Formatting ralphs wrote: >> No. You can not create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB under >> Windows XP. >> >> However, you *can* create such a partition externally, and Windows >> XP will happily use it. > > Ok, thanks. I guess XP is keeping me from having clusters that are too > large. Trying to. Again, you can easily get around the restriction, if you want to. Personally, I'd use NTFS, but it's your choice. -- Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User Please reply to the newsgroup
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