W2k Pro HD Formatting Problems

[UNLTuba]

I just installed a third hard drive in my system to use as a boot disk for my newly acquired W2k Pro. Before, I had been using a pair of 40GB Maxtor drives (in RAID - mirroring) as my only hard drive in Windows 98SE. I got W2k up and running just fine on the new boot drive, and pulled everything that I wanted to save off of the 40s. As I no longer need mirroring now, I would like to re-format the 40GB drives and put them in a stripping array rather than mirroring as they were before. Every time I try to format though, it gives me a message that Windows could not complete the format (in the quick format or the full). I'm wondering what I can try to get this working correctly. Any help at all would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance...

 

[TexDotCom]

You will get that message if you try to format any drive over 32GB with FAT32. If that is the file system you are trying to use, it will not work. You will need to format it with NTFS. It should work fine then. There are a few articles about this issue in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, too.

Hope this helps.

 

[UNLTuba]

What then, for all practical purposes, is the difference between FAT32 and NTFS? I was in fact trying to format the 40s with FAT32 because I had heard that it's better for large storage drives. Also, I'm not very fimilliar with using FDisk and Windows 2000. Could someone please give me a run-down on how to do it correctly? Thanks!

 

[TexDotCom]

When FAT32 came out, it was better for "large storage drives" because people were stuck with FAT16, which only supported up to 2GB partitions. FAT32 supports up to 32GB partitions. I do not remember the exact number for NTFS, but it has something like 4 Terabyte partition support. FDISK is the same regardless of the OS...it is dependent upon the type of partition on the drive (if there is one there at all). Unfortunately, I am at work and cannot get into a lengthy explanation of FDISK, but I am sure someone out there in the AT forums can help. Or, you can go to Google and type in "how to FDISK a hard drive" and you probably come up with some good how-to web pages.

Good luck, and sorry I could not help more than that.