External Hard Drive FAT32 Partiton Size Limit.

  • Thread starter Thread starter scharf.steven
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S

scharf.steven

I have two identical Vantec Nexstar external HD cases (USB/1394). One
has a Maxtor 200GB drive, divided into two 100GB FAT32 partitions. The
other is new, and I put in a 250GB WD drive. Neither XP, nor the WD
software, will allow me to have larger that a 32GB FAT32 partition. I
can have eight 31GB FAT32 partitions just fine, but not one or two
large partitions.

Is this a limit of the WD drive? I know that it's not the external
enclosure.
 
When you buy an external drive/enclosure combination from a drive
manufacturer (Seagate, WD etc) the drive usually comes formatted as fat32.

You have found the limitation of Windows XP. You can not format any fat32
partition larger than 32 gig.

The work around is to create/format the partition by booting up into
Partition Magic from their 2 floppy set that the program allows you to
create. Then you are not bound by this restriction.

You can also partition/format the drive by booting up from a Windows 98se or
a Windows ME setup floppy and use the combination of the fdisk and format
commands to create one large partition and format same.

Of the two, Partition Magic is easier as you have a visual interface to see
what you are doing. But both work the same.

Note: With older M/B's you may have to remove the drive from the external
enclosure to perform the actions as the drive may not be seen while in the
USB/Firewire enclosure (bios limitation). The drive will have to be
connected to an IDE cable connected to one of the IDE ports on the M/B.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from: George Ankner
"If you knew as much as you thought you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!"
 
Richard Urban said:
When you buy an external drive/enclosure combination from a drive
manufacturer (Seagate, WD etc) the drive usually comes formatted as fat32.

You have found the limitation of Windows XP. You can not format any fat32
partition larger than 32 gig.

The work around is to create/format the partition by booting up into
Partition Magic from their 2 floppy set that the program allows you to
create. Then you are not bound by this restriction.

You can also partition/format the drive by booting up from a Windows 98se
or a Windows ME setup floppy and use the combination of the fdisk and
format commands to create one large partition and format same.

Of the two, Partition Magic is easier as you have a visual interface to
see what you are doing. But both work the same.

Note: With older M/B's you may have to remove the drive from the external
enclosure to perform the actions as the drive may not be seen while in the
USB/Firewire enclosure (bios limitation). The drive will have to be
connected to an IDE cable connected to one of the IDE ports on the M/B.
--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
Click to expand...


Steven:
Is your question purely theoretical or are you actually interested in
creating FAT32 partitions > 32 GB on your USB external HD? Aside from the PM
process as Richard Urban describes and the Win9x/Me Startup disk
FDISK/FORMAT process, there is another way to accomplish this from *within*
XP using a freely available Linux-developed program. If you (or anyone else)
is interested in this, please so indicate and I'll detail the steps.
Understand what I'm referring to is *not* a conversion process from NTFS to
FAT32, but a *formatting* process, so that any existing data on the
partition will be lost.

But just out of curiosity, is there some practical reason why you're
interested in creating FAT32 partitions on your second external drive?
Anna
 

From XP. As you say, it's an XP limitation.

Partitioning and formatting tools come in three types:
1) Those too old to know better
2) Those new enough to know better, that do
3) Those new enough to know better, but are brain-dead

DOS and Win9x are type (1)
XP "Gold" (original) is both type (1) and (3).
XP SP1 and SP2 understand > 137G, but are still type (3).

Beware of (1) - your tools have to understand how to address hard
drives over the various historical capacity limits, such as 32G, 137G,
and in some cases, arbitrary capacities in between.

For example, Win95/98 FDisk can't cope with capacities over 50G or so
(40G OK, 60G+ show erroneous capacity). The FDisk from WinME, plus
the "fixed" Win98 FDisk, fail at 100G in that they cannot input or
display values over that number of digits, but they are fine for 60G
and 80G. None of these are OK over 137G.

An example of (2) would be BootIt New Generation (BING, from
www.bootitng.com). Cheaper than Partition Magic, free for evaluation,
and works very well indeed.

NB: If these portable HDs are to be used with systems that have
capacity limitations, e.g. Win9x or NT up until XP Gold, or PCs with
old BIOSs, then be veeerrrry careful indeed. Thumbsuck stats: Only 1%
or so of my clients use external HDs, but they account for a third of
cases of corrupted file systems and a fifth of hardware failures.


-------------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
Click to expand...
Tip Of The Day:
To disable the 'Tip of the Day' feature...
 
I created this drive in order to dump everything off an old Window's 98
system. The 32MB is a minor hassle, not worth worrying about.

However now that I have installed XP on my kid's new machine, I may
need to go back and do a dual-boot system with 98, because many of the
educational programs he uses don't work under XP, even in compatibiity
mode (even one program distributed by Microsoft!).
 
Steven:
Is your question purely theoretical or are you actually interested in
creating FAT32 partitions > 32 GB on your USB external HD? Aside from the PM
process as Richard Urban describes and the Win9x/Me Startup disk
FDISK/FORMAT process, there is another way to accomplish this from *within*
XP using a freely available Linux-developed program. If you (or anyone else)
is interested in this, please so indicate and I'll detail the steps.
Understand what I'm referring to is *not* a conversion process from NTFS to
FAT32, but a *formatting* process, so that any existing data on the
partition will be lost.

But just out of curiosity, is there some practical reason why you're
interested in creating FAT32 partitions on your second external drive?
Anna[/QUOTE]

Hi Anna,
I understand this thread is old, but if you can still reply to Steven's original issue I'd appreciate it a lot. Similar to him I now need to reformat my external usb hdd (a WD hdd with some cheap usb2 enclosure that I put together).
Currently the usb hdd is ext3, but I need something universal that I can use at work (Solaris and Debian) but also at home (WinXP, Win2K). I've used all kind of ext2/3 drivers for windows then tried ntfs drivers for linux. Now I started using Solaris 10 and I think fat32 is easiest choice, it takes too much time tweaking third party drivers.
The Disk Management tool in XP won't do it, I must admit I haven't tried the mkfs in linux, because I was experimenting with ESX server and deleted debian for now.
If you read this post, please mention the name of the Linux-developed tool you mentioned in your 2005 post.
Cheers
Jon
 
If you are running windows search for swissknife.exe Its a freeware utility that will allow you to graphically format your USB external drive with Fat32.
 
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