Creating & Formatting FAT32 Partition in WinXP

[Wyck]

Just got a 160gb USB hard disk and am going to be installing it tomorrow morning for a customer w/ Windows 98. I need to have it formatted in FAT32 by then, but all I've got at the home office is Windows XP - Right off the bat, Disk Management doesn't seem to allow anything other than NTFS... I do have a Win98 boot disk but I don't believe it will see the USB drive to format it. Can I get a a 3rd party utility to let me do it real quick? If so, which one? I'd rather not buy anything... Thanks!

 

[DaveSimmons]

Did it come with a manual and/or software disk/CD? Did you check the manufacturer website?

 

[Wyck]

It only came with a USB 2.0 driver disk for Win9X, which isn't the issue. The instructions only say how to format it as NTFS on XP or FAT32 on Win9X. I need FAT32 on XP.

 

[corkyg]

XP should format as FAT32 with no problem. It does that by default anyway - you have to actually convert to NTFS.

 

[John]

Remove the drive from the enclosure and hook it up to your ide cable.

 

[McMadman]

I don't think this will be possible to format under xp due to M$ only wanting you to use ntfs for drives/partitions larger than 32gb


Can you try to use a bootdisk off bootdisk.com or perhaps find a friend with a copy of partition magic and borrow it?

 

[pat79]

Use Partition Magic!!
You can download the latest version for free trial here;
http://www.powerquest.com/downloads/eval-soho.cfm

 

[AndyHui]

Both Windows 2000 and Windows XP will not allow you to format partitions larger than 32GB as FAT32. They force you to use NTFS.

If you want a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB, you will need to format with Win98SE with the 64GB+ FDisk patch, or WinME.

 

[McMadman]

Your biggest "problem" is the usb support, but if you could pull it from the enclosure, connect to your computer, use a 9x boot disk for partition/format and then put it back in the enclosure you would be fine.

the partition magic demo may support it, and get what you need done without opening the enclosure.