Bob
Why was the suggestion made? What prompted the advice? There may be another
way to deal with the problem?
There is (at least) one occasion when there is a very good reason
for sticking to FAT32. If you have Win98 and WinXP on the same
machine and you use drives other than C: to accommodate programs and
data which will be used by both operating systems, then you must
stick with FAT32.
The only problem that I have had with this was the need to format a
USB2 160Gb external HD with FAT32. The job was done eventually.
With advancing age my memory has decided to go into early retirement
so I try to make copious notes when doing anything unusual. Here
are my notes about FAT32 formatting large HDs.
I hope that they help somebody!
Peter
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26th June 2004.
FORMATTING OF INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES.
This note has been prompted by difficulties experienced when fitting
the 160Gb HD to the i-Buddie external hard drive.
1. Important background information.
At any time this system operates with one of three selectable
bootable drives as drive C:.
The choice is made at start-up via Boot Magic immediately following
the BIOS sequence.
The three selectable drives can be any combination of Windows98-SE
and WindowsXP Pro.
Hard drives D: to O: inclusive are all common to Windows98-SE and
WindowsXP Pro. For this reason formatting of all drives has to be
FAT32 to ensure complete interchangeability of data.
2. How I set up the new HD.
(Perhaps this is not the most direct method but it worked)
As supplied the HD was neither partitioned or formatted.
Not wanting to put the data on the two internal HDs at risk I
disconnected them and temporarily connected the new HD to the end
connector on the IDE cable and one of the two free Molex power
connectors. This seemed to be logical but when booting from the
Win98-SE system floppy or Partition Magic Rescue floppies the new HD
was not detected.
I then reconnected the two internal HDs and the new HD as the
external HD.
Booting into XP1 and going to My Computer - Manage - Disk drives, I
was able to detect the external HD and make it visible.
Using Windows Explorer I attempted to FAT32 format the external HD.
This was not possible. However the HD had to be formatted so I
formatted it NTFS.
Once again, not wanting to put the data on the two internal HDs at
risk I disconnected them and temporarily connected the new HD to the
end connector on the IDE cable and one of the two free Molex power
connectors.
Booting with the Windows98-SE system disk the HD was detected. I
then ran "Delpart.exe" which deleted the partition allowing me to
use "Fdisk" and then format FAT32. It is not possible to format
FAT32 "On top" of an existing NTFS partitioned HD.
Now that the new 160 Gb HD was FAT32 formatted I reconnected the two
internal HDs and the new HD as the external HD.
Booting into XP1 I was able to use Partition Magic to re-size the
partition on the new HD. The partition is an "Extended Partition" of
156.719Gb preceded by 7.8Mb of unallocated space. There must be a
reason for that space but I have not investigated!
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