USB Hard Drive FAT32 Format

  • Thread starter Thread starter JRS
  • Start date Start date
J

JRS

Why does XP home only offer NTFS when I try to format this drive. I have
managed to do it thru a DOS box but surely I should be able to do it from
XP?

Jon
 
Sorry, thought I had done it thru DOS box but it says disk is too big. It is
only 40Gb and worked fine as Fat32 under Win98SE

Jon
 
XP cannot format FAT32 disks bigger than 32GB . It can use them, though

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XP refuses to format any disk larger than 32Gig as FAT32. That is
Microsoft's way of suggesting that big disks might perform better as NTFS.
However, XP will happily use a pre-formated FAT32 disk bigger than 32Gig.
You just need to use a third-party program to do the formatting. it it were
an internal disk, you could use FDISK or GDISK. For a USB disk, you might
think about Partition Magic, or other partition changing program.
 
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