Extended addressing under Win 2000 Pro

[frischmoutt]

I was running out of letters on a Win 2000 Pro SP4 computer. I decided to
remove the small logic units and to build a greater partition.
Windows begins to format it then stops @ 100% telling that the disk was too
large for a FAT32.
For other reasons I don't want to format to NTFS.
Partition Magic under DOS did the job, ending with a 40 GB big partition.
Win2000 sees it but I seem to recall that I need to load some driver or to
configure something in order that the OS is stable with it.

But, what shall do ?

TIA

 

[Frank McCoy]

I was running out of letters on a Win 2000 Pro SP4 computer. I decided to
remove the small logic units and to build a greater partition.
Windows begins to format it then stops @ 100% telling that the disk was too
large for a FAT32.

It's NOT; but Windows Format sometimes says so, in an attempt to get you
to switch to NTFS. You need a different tool than Windows Format.

If it's a Western Digital Drive (or you have one in your system) then
WD's Data Lifeguard will format it for you with the big partition, and
Windows will run with it; even though Windows Format says it can't be
formatted that big.

For other reasons I don't want to format to NTFS.
Partition Magic under DOS did the job, ending with a 40 GB big partition.

Only 40 gig?
I was suspecting the partition to be over 300gig for Windows Format to
complain.

Oops! Oh, that's right: You're using Win-2000, not Win-XP SP-2.
My bad. Still, like I said, *other* tools will format it just *fine*.

Win2000 sees it but I seem to recall that I need to load some driver or to
configure something in order that the OS is stable with it.

But, what shall do ?

If your BIOS recognizes the drive as 40gig, DOS chkdsk does the same,
and opening a DOS window and running chkdsk also gives a 40gig drive,
then I'd say things were *just fine*. It's when one of those three
*doesn't* recognize the full size of the drive that you have problems.
Also just look at the drive in Windows Explorer and see what *it* says
about the drive capacity.

FDISK probably won't; but that's expected.