repartition external hard drive

[RDI]

i purchased a western digital 160 GB hard drive,
installed it into an external enclosure to convert to
firwire connection.

the tech support at the store installed the drive and
formatted it to fat32 as a single partition.

i want to partition the drive to 2 partitions of 80 GB
each. according to microsoft knowlege base, (Microsoft
Knowledge Base Article - 255867) i should open the
command box and type FDISK to do this. when i do this i
get the error message: FDISK is not recogized as an
internal or external command, operable program or batch
file.

how do i enable fdisk, or more importantly, how do i
partition this external drive into two 80GB drives?

thanks in advance

 

[CS]

i purchased a western digital 160 GB hard drive,
installed it into an external enclosure to convert to
firwire connection.

the tech support at the store installed the drive and
formatted it to fat32 as a single partition.

i want to partition the drive to 2 partitions of 80 GB
each. according to microsoft knowlege base, (Microsoft
Knowledge Base Article - 255867) i should open the
command box and type FDISK to do this. when i do this i
get the error message: FDISK is not recogized as an
internal or external command, operable program or batch
file.

how do i enable fdisk, or more importantly, how do i
partition this external drive into two 80GB drives?

First, you can not format a drive or partition to FAT-32 any larger
than 32gb when using the utility from XP. You can however, format
the drive using FDisk from Win98 or some third party utility such as
Partition Magic.

Second, why in the world do you wish to format a drive that large
using FAT-32? The cluster slack alone would waste around 30% of the
drive. It would also be slow. Use NTFS instead and you can format
it from within XP into two or even one partition. Cluster slack
would then be minimal (4K clusters) and the drive would certainly be a
lot faster.

 

[RDI]

thanks for the reply's. i am sharing this 160 GB hard
drive with an Imac. according to what i've read, the mac
cannot see a drive larger than 137GB, so i have to
partition it down. i have tested it on the mac and it
wants to initialize the drive. i am expecting the drive
to be recognized when it is properly sized.

i plan to share video file between the two platforms and
need a large external firewire hard drive to accomplish
ths, as it's my most efficient means both physically and
financially.

thanks

rdi

 

[Bob Harris]

If on of the PC has the 137 Gig limit, that is probably a
BIOS limit on the total hard drive size, not merely an
operating system limit on the maximum partition size. o,
even if you do create 80+80 partitions, it still may not
be recognized by te iMac. Any chance that Apple has a
BIOS patch?

However, if you want to try the 80+80 split anyway,
Partition Magic version 8 can probably do it.