How to format large drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brett
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Brett

I'm trying to format a 40GB drive in Win2k Pro in Computer Management
(Administrative Tools). There is one partition on the drive. I always get
a "volume to large" message and can't format. I tried changing the
allocation unit size from default to 512 then 1024 but get "cluster size to
small" every time. Any ideas how I format this with one partition?

Thanks,
Brett
 
Brett said:
I'm trying to format a 40GB drive in Win2k Pro in Computer Management
(Administrative Tools). There is one partition on the drive. I always get
a "volume to large" message and can't format. I tried changing the
allocation unit size from default to 512 then 1024 but get "cluster size to
small" every time. Any ideas how I format this with one partition?

Thanks,
Brett
Click to expand...

You are presumably dealing with a FAT32 partition. Windows
2000 won't format such partitions to more than 32 GBytes.
Make it an NTFS partition instead!
 
Pegasus (MVP) said:
You are presumably dealing with a FAT32 partition. Windows
2000 won't format such partitions to more than 32 GBytes.
Make it an NTFS partition instead!
Click to expand...
I want to sell the drive to some one using any version of Windows. How will
those using Win95, 98, an ME be able to reformat to FAT32? I don't believe
those versions support NTFS. Or is it an issue for them?

Thanks,
Brett
 
Brett said:
I want to sell the drive to some one using any version of Windows. How will
those using Win95, 98, an ME be able to reformat to FAT32? I don't believe
those versions support NTFS. Or is it an issue for them?

Thanks,
Brett
Click to expand...

Partition the disk like so:

Drive C: - 10 GByte FAT32 (plenty of room for Windows and for the
applications)
Drive D: - 30 GByte FAT32 (for data files)

The alternative is to buy a product such as PQMagic. It lets you format
FAT32 partitions to much more than 32 GBytes - but it costs money!
 
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