Needs basic help with erased hard drive(all partitions erased)

  • Thread starter Thread starter jbclem
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J

jbclem

I have a 40 GB IBM hard drive that has partition and master boot record problems. I
was running Win2000 on it. In the process of trying to fix this I've managed, using
FDISK, to erase the one partition (C:) that was working, and of course the other bad
ones. Now when I run FDISK (a different FDISK from the one I used before I erased it
off the hard drive) and try to create a primary partition, I'm limited to a 2 GB
partition and only an additional 6 GB for the extended partition.

So I need to create a bootable DOS disk with the most current FDISK and Command Com so I
can set up FAT32 and be able to FDISK the entire 40 GB. I've looked at Bootdisk.com but
I'm not sure if I should use the Dos 6.22 boot disk (will it handle 40 GB and Fat32 ?)
or the Win2000 boot disks. Or should I just reboot with my Win2000 CD...will that
enable me to FDISK and set up the hard drive before continuing on into the Win2000
setup?

Any suggestions would be welcome.

jc
 
Assuming that you're going to reinstall Win2000 (and why else would you post
this question to a Win2000 group?), just boot using the Win2000 CD. As one
of the steps it gives you the opportunity to create and format partitions.
 
I just tried that but it only gives me the option of formating a partition as NTFS, and
I want to use FAT32 so I can exchange files between this computer and my primary
computer. So far I haven't seen a way to go to FAT32 from the Win2000 setup. If I have
to create a Dos boot disk, do you know if the MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk would work?

jc
 
jbclem said:
I have a 40 GB IBM hard drive that has partition and master boot record problems. I
was running Win2000 on it. In the process of trying to fix this I've managed, using
FDISK, to erase the one partition (C:) that was working, and of course the other bad
ones. Now when I run FDISK (a different FDISK from the one I used before I erased it
off the hard drive) and try to create a primary partition, I'm limited to a 2 GB
partition and only an additional 6 GB for the extended partition.

So I need to create a bootable DOS disk with the most current FDISK and Command Com so I
can set up FAT32 and be able to FDISK the entire 40 GB. I've looked at Bootdisk.com but
I'm not sure if I should use the Dos 6.22 boot disk (will it handle 40 GB and Fat32 ?)
or the Win2000 boot disks. Or should I just reboot with my Win2000 CD...will that
enable me to FDISK and set up the hard drive before continuing on into the Win2000
setup?

Any suggestions would be welcome.

jc
Click to expand...

It seems you're mixing several OSs in your attempt to
create partitions.
- fdisk.exe is a DOS/Win9x command. It does not exist
under Win2000.
- DOS/WinNT has a limit of 2 GBytes for FAT partitions.
Win9x can handle much larger partitions.
- When you boot your machine with your Win2000 CD
then the installation process gives you the option of creating
a FAT32 or an NTFS partition.
- If you just want to create a large FAT32 partition, boot
the machine with a Win98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com
and use fdisk.exe & format.exe to create the desired partition.
 
If you're transferring files via LAN, the file systems on the two
computers are irrelevant.
 
File system doesn't matter when exchanging files between computers. It only
matters if you are dual booting Win9x and Win2k. Just run setup from the cd
and format NTFS.
Louis
 
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