Formatting Large Hard Drives...

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Guest

WinXPProSP2
SATA 300GB HDD

How can I format the drive to the full capacity using FAT32? I know it is
not a limitation of FAT32 as it can utilize drives up to 2TB.

Thanx.
 
Steven Sinclair said:
WinXPProSP2
SATA 300GB HDD

How can I format the drive to the full capacity using FAT32? I know it is
not a limitation of FAT32 as it can utilize drives up to 2TB.

Thanx.
Click to expand...

Stupid (arrogant?) WXP won't let you format a FAT32 partition over 32Gb.
I suppose you could use a W98 boot floppy/CD to FDisk and format your
hard drive they way you want it..

I own a two-year old version of Norton Ghost that includes the ability to
make
bootable floppies that include DOS versions of Ghost.exe and GDisk.exe.
GDisk can do partition creation, deletion, activation, and hiding, as well
as
quickly format huge Fat32 partitions. I don't know whether the
latest version of Ghost includes this capability under Windows or DOS.

-Paul Randall
 
Pegasus (MVP) said:
AFAIK, DOS has a limit of 32 GBytes for FAT32 partitions.
Furthermore it is unlikely to recognise a SATA disk.
Click to expand...

The format.com utility that comes with Win98 does not have that limitation
(the Fdisk.exe from W98 does have a 127Gb partition size though and a
maximum disk size of 500Gb(see the link below)), but it might not help him
as he has a SATA drive which I didn't notice in the original post unless he
can run the format.com from a command prompt window.

http://www.hexff.com/w98_hd.php
 
Pegasus (MVP) said:
AFAIK, DOS has a limit of 32 GBytes for FAT32 partitions.
Click to expand...

Which disk operating system (DOS) are you speaking of?

What specific limitation within the disk operating system are you speaking
of?
 
Pegasus (MVP) said:
AFAIK, DOS has a limit of 32 GBytes for FAT32 partitions.
Furthermore it is unlikely to recognise a SATA disk.
Click to expand...

On a cheapo Compaq desktop with Vista preinstalled on a 160GB NTFS formatted
SATA drive that had not been booted from, I was able to boot to DOS with a
bootable CD and run Norton GDisk.exe to view the drive's partitioning and
Ghost to back up the hard drive.

DOS commands like dir could not see the SATA drive because it was NTFS
formated, not because it was SATA. The Dir command could see the 200GB
FAT32 formatted PATA drive to which I did the backup.

-Paul Randall
 
:
: : I own a two-year old version of Norton Ghost that includes the ability to
: make
: bootable floppies that include DOS versions of Ghost.exe and GDisk.exe.
: GDisk can do partition creation, deletion, activation, and hiding, as well
: as
: quickly format huge Fat32 partitions. I don't know whether the
: latest version of Ghost includes this capability under Windows or DOS.
:
: -Paul Randall


Paul,
The last version of Ghost was 10. The cd and the emergency cd are bootable but do not contain Ghost.exe and Gdisk.exe like prior versions.

But...Ghost 10 also included(on the cd) a copy of Ghost 2003 version(backward compatibility) which if installed contains the ability to create the normal emergency boot disk with Ghost.exe. One can then also copy GDisk.exe from the hard drive(Gdisk folder) to the same floppy.

To ensure forward compatibility, the Ghost 10 emergency cd can read 2003 image files.

...winston


:
:
 

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