Formatting large HD with FAT32

[rkoenn]

I have been doing computers for years but am stumped by a current problem. I have a "Frankenstein" machine with an eMachines MB. It uses the Intel 810 chipset and a buddy is using it strictly to play music in his workshop. I have a 120GB Seagate HD to put in it and want to install Win98SE. However when I try to set it up with Fdisk it only allows me to use 50GB of the 120 capacity. I did some searching and FAT32 should allow me the full capacity. I put it in my XP machine and it shows 120GB available. What should I try next. The MB shows the LBA capacity correctly at 120GB. I am stumped by this one. Help is appreciated.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

If it were me, I would pull down the disk tools for your drive from the manufacturer. lifeguard or whatever has a setup tool that should partition and format the drive. If there is some type of OS level limitation, I think that it puts some info into the boot sector to allow the whole drive to be seen. That worked for me on some old systems.

If not that, then I would see about getting a KNOPPIX disk and booting into that. See if you can partition with it, and clean everything up.

I would also check to make sure that you deleted all of the old partitions off the drive.

 

[Matthias99]

Please don't crosspost.

I answered this already in GH... I'm pretty sure it is a limitation of the old fdisk from Win95/98. If you format/partition it with something else you should be OK.

 

[Nothinman]

MS doesn't let you creat FAT partitions over 32G any more because they want you to use NTFS and they're right, FAT is a terrible filesystem and should only be used when there's no other choice. The fdisk problem you're seeing could be any number of limitations caused by BIOS or DOS support.

The option of using a Linux LiveCD isn't a bad one, using gparted to create the partition should be no different than using an older version of PQMagic. Hell you might even consider using Linux instead of Win98 since the machine is just for playing music.