Formatting hard drive

[Karen]

I posted a question here yesterday about a problem I'm
having (courtesy of Dell tech support) with formatting a
new drive.

They had me use FDISK for Win 98 to format my new 120GB
drive (in NTFS), but because it was FDISK for Win 98, it
only formatted 32GB.

Now I'm trying to get all 120GB formatted, but Win XP's
disk management system only seems to be recognizing this
drive as having a max of 32GB to be partitioned or
formatted.

How do I get it to understand that the drive has 120GB?

Would physically removing the drive help?

 

[Steve Sinchak]

Hi Karen,

Your problem is that you did not actually format your hard drive with NTFS.
Using a Windows 98 boot disk it is not possible to format your drive with
NTFS. Most likely what happened is that when you formatted the drive with
fdisk, it formatted the drive with FAT16 which supports a maximum disk size
of 32GB (I thought it was a lot lower than this but maybe I am wrong).
fdisk is a very old progarm and does not support the latest file systems
such as the new versions of NTFS which Windows XP uses. What you need to do
is reformat the drive with NTFS. You can do that with the Windows XP
install CD durring the install process. Boot up from the install CD, then
proceed with setup and delete all of the partitions and create a new one and
format it with NTFS when it is asking you where to install Windows.

- Steve Sinchak

 

[Doug Allen [MSFT]]

Karen,

I saw that you had replied to my post yesterday. Were you able to try my
previous suggestions?

--
Doug Allen
Windows 2000 MCSE
Microsoft Enterprise NT4/Win2k/XP/Win2k3 Setup Support

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.