Fat32 Partioning in WinXP

[MacDude]

I have an 80 hard drive with a 15Gig NTFS partition and WinXP installed on it. The rest (65 Gigs) is unformatted. I want to have a partition for shared data between windows and Linux and another two partitions for Mandrake Linux (boot and swap).

I used to windows computer management tool to create a new logical partition and inside it I create a new extended partition that I formated in NTFS. How can I partition this thing in FAT32 instead of NTFS? Windows will simply not let me do it! But I need the FAT32 for Linux compatibility. Also, should I put Linux on the same logical partition as the shared data or on a new logical parition all together?

 

[rutchtkim]

you must specify which file system to format in. Boot into dos and type this at the command prompt
C:\>format <drive letter>: /fs:fat32
I would put linux on its own partition, just in case something goes wrong,

goodluck

 

[MacDude]

Thanks, it worked. I did not need to boot into dos, I just needed to open a command prompt. Why M$ didn't include this in the computer management tool is beyond me.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Microsoft does not want you to create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB, they prefer you use NTFS, so they make it hard to do. If you had created a smaller partition, FAT32 would have been available. It would have been possible to create an extended partition and then multiple volumes inside of that, rather than just making one large partition.