No FAT in XP?

[lerch]

i am merely trying to format a secondary HD to FAT32 and i
am stumped.i have tried it on 2 different puter 1 w XP
Home and the other with XP Pro.both i have gone to Disk
Management,initailized the HD,and started the New Disk
Wizard Whatever it is.and when get to asked"type of format?
i see only NTFS.No FAT32.Why is this?i even tried to
formating by booting of the XP CD,and then formating with
the XP SETUP,but it will only list NTFS for this drive.it
is a WD1200JB.Any ideas pls let me know.

 

[David Candy]

Partitions are too big? If so get 98 to format it. XP won't let you make silly sized partitions but 98 doesn't care.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

XP will not format a FAT32 partition over 32 gig in size. If your partition
is larger than that, you'll have to use a Win98 boot disk to format the
drive. XP will use FAT32 partitions larger than 32 Gig, it just won't
create them.

 

[Norm]

Download and create a boot disk from bootdisk.com. Then just boot the
computer from that floppy, run fdisk and create a partition, reboot and then
format it.

 

[Guest]

Doug,David and Norm...Thanks for the info.i did not know
that.Makes no sense why MS does what it does i guess but
what can you do.Thanks guys..Lerch

 

[Lorne Smith]

They did it because > 32gb in FAT32 is very slow and inefficient compared to
NTFS. It will also have a lot of wasted space... NTFS is the filesystem of
choice when running XP.

Lorne

 

[Tim Slattery]

Doug,David and Norm...Thanks for the info.i did not know
that.Makes no sense why MS does what it does i guess but
what can you do.Thanks guys..Lerch

This policy makes a lot of sense! FAT32 doesn't scale well. NTFS is
*much* better suited to manage large partitions. Win98 will create any
size partition with FAT32 because there is no alternative in that
system. In WinXP, NTFS is available so there is NO reason to use FAT32
for huge partitions!