xp won't recognize over 32 gigs

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newsposter

My friend had a 40 gig drive in win98se. It was all one partition. He
bought XP and installed it with fat32. I told him he should have chosen
ntfs so he reinstalled under ntfs. Now he has a 32 gig drive and the 8
gigs aren't visible. He thinks there may be data there he needs.

Any ideas how to
1. get the full drive expanded without reinstalling?

2. save any data on the 8gig missing?

Thanks
 
newsposter said:
My friend had a 40 gig drive in win98se. It was all one partition. He
bought XP and installed it with fat32. I told him he should have chosen
ntfs so he reinstalled under ntfs. Now he has a 32 gig drive and the 8
gigs aren't visible. He thinks there may be data there he needs.

Any ideas how to
1. get the full drive expanded without reinstalling?

2. save any data on the 8gig missing?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I'm betting he wiped his drive clean when he reinstalled. There's no other
way the partition could have become smaller and it would explain why he's
missing data. In that case, the 8gb is just empty space.

Next time, advise to just convert to NTFS instead of reinstalling, where
there's a chance a person could do what your friend did.

The only way to expand the partition is to use a 3rd party program like
partition magic. Another option would be to add a new partition in the empty
space.
 
Yes that is it. Partition Magic will help.

When creating/formatting a FAT32 partition, XP limits it to 32 GB.

Y.
 
XP can recognize 100% of a 40Gig disk that has been pre-formatted to FAT32,
suhc as in a Win98 machine.

XP can not format a partition larger than 32 Gig as FAT32. Thta is a
"feature" of XP. Other programs have no trouble formatting large disk as
FAT32. The latest version of FDISK can do it, as can GDISK (Norton) as can
Partition Magic.

Your friend probably chose to format as FAT32, thereby (1) losing all data,
(2) limiting himself to 32 Gig + 8 Gig.

However, if he did NOT do a format, or let XP do one as part of the upgrade,
then there is one other possibility: Older PCs had a BIOS limitation of 32
Gig related to their IDE disk controllers. Clever disk makers got around
that by tricky software that was operaitng system dependent. Thus, the full
40 Gig disk could be seen by Win98, but not by XP, on a PC with an older
BIOS. Unfortunately, such trick are not very robust, and it may be
impossible to get XP to see the disk. The better ways to handle a BIOS
limitation would have been (1) a BIOS update, if available, (2) a separate
PCI adapter card with its own IDE controllers.

If your friend has lost all data anyway, then I would suggest using a DOS
boot floppy and FDISK to remove all partitition, then create one 40 Gig
partition, and make it FAT32, then re-install XP.
 
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