Formatting

[ralphs]

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?

 

[Ken Blake]

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.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

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

 

[Curt Christianson]

| 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
www.aumha.org
Practically Nerded,...
http://dundats.mvps.org/Index.htm

 

[ralphs]

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.

 

[ralphs]

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.

 

[Tim Slattery]

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."

 

[Ken Blake]

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.