HELP HARD DRIVE PROBLEM!!

[Hyperlite]

i'd start over from scratch. delete all the partitions, and you MUST use NTFS, correct me someone if i'm wrong, but FAT32 has a maximum size of 20GB.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: Confusednewbie1552
Is there a way I can changed the 10 gigabyte FAT32 partion and change it into a NTFS one. What's better in NTFS? I'm just a bit edgy about having two different types of formats.

Start -> Run -> convert c: /fs:ntfs

Reboot, then it'll convert automatically.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: Hyperlite
i'd start over from scratch. delete all the partitions, and you MUST use NTFS, correct me someone if i'm wrong, but FAT32 has a maximum size of 20GB.

Windows XP has a programmed limit of 64Gb (or 32Gb, one of those two) for FAT32 partitions, but in reality, they can be much bigger if made in DOS / Partition Magic / etc, it's just that the filesystem gets very wasteful over a certain size.
FAT32 can actually support volumes up to 2,000Gb (2Tb) in size.

Source.

 

[unbiased]

Cofusednewbie,
Listen to the oldmen of the forum and reformat the whole drive. If you prefer FAT32 it is better to do the formatting using win98 boot floppy. BTW there was no problem partitioning and formatting bigger disks with the bootable floppy disk( using fdisk and format commands). All sorts of bootable discs are available on bootdisk.com.

After formatting you can freshly instal your winXP and the other paraphernalia.

Dopefiend,
How is FAT32 wasteful if it is used in a 80 GB HDD, when it can go upto 2000 GB? Can you elaborate please?

 

[McMadman]

for the record, a win98 floppy will need to have the updated fdisk.exe in order to use a drive greater than 64gb
http://support.microsoft.com/d...x?scid=kb;en-us;263044
They don't officially support lba48 with it either, but partition magic will work fine with >137gb
partition magic does seem to have an artificial limit with fat32 at ~200gb for a primary partition (possibly 200 gb per partition) but most people nowadays won't bother with fat32 unless dualbooting.

 

[Confusednewbie1552]

Yes it did leave the frontpage, i checked every single time.

Anyway thanks so far, if I reinstall windows and delete the current 10 GB partion does everything on it get deleted? Cause I want this hard drive to be as if nothing was installed on it =)

 

[McMadman]

Short answer - yes it'll be blank and perfect for a clean reinstall. Just delete your 10gb partition and make your new one(s) as desired and previously mentioned in this thread.

Long answer, repartitioning/reformatting in reality will just wipe the file tables but data could still be recovered until overwritten. This is why files can often be fairly easily recovered after a format.

It'll be treated as though theres was never anything on the drive, so it'll be a clean install, just boot off your windows cd and at the partitioning step delete the 10gb partition and then make a new one (fat32s artificial limit is 32gb, ntfs is the preferred choice) and once the partition is created/formatted windows'll go through the rest of the install process.

Hopefully that clears things up.

 

[keyboardcaper]

first of all dont use microsoft's old fdisk utility, thats why you have a problem with "64gig limitation", about what you have now, get QTParted and resize the partition (without loosing your data if i believe correctly) there is atleast 3 ways i can think of to save yourself without reinstalling

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: unbiased
Dopefiend,
How is FAT32 wasteful if it is used in a 80 GB HDD, when it can go upto 2000 GB? Can you elaborate please?

Certainly. It's all down to cluster sizes and slack space.
Let's say that you have a FAT32-formatted drive, and you want to store a 4Kb text document on that drive. The file is written to a cluster, which is a unit of storage in a filesystem. This cluster, for example, is 64Kb in size, and the file takes up 4Kb of that. This means that the remaining 60Kb is lost, or "slack space", as it cannot be used for other files.

Now let's say you have a hundred thousand 4Kb files to store. Again, they each take up 4Kb in each cluster, and 60Kb is wasted. 60Kb x 100,000 = 6Gb. That's 6Gb of space that's lost, and cannot be used for anything else.
In the same situation with NTFS, let's assume that it's using a 4Kb cluster size. The file is written, and takes up all 4Kb of space. The same 100,000 files will take up 400Mb, instead of 6.4Gb under FAT32.
Of course, storing 100,000 4Kb text documents is fairly unlikely, but it demonstrates how NTFS can scale better than FAT32, and why Microsoft would prefer people to stop using it soon. If you need to view your 2000/XP partition under Windows 9x, then you need to use FAT32, or a third-party NTFS tool to be able to see the files.

With encryption, on-the-fly compression, mount points, permissons & security, journaling and other NTFS-only features, FAT32 really isn't much of an alternative these days. NTFS is also a fair bit faster when working with extremely large directories- the time to open and display that directory of 100,000 files will be painfully long with FAT32.
However, FAT32 is a bit faster in some cases, mostly when working with video files or other large files. You will, of course, run into the 1Gb file size limitation under FAT32 though...

I hope this explains things a bit better; the reason that Microsoft have stopped Windows from formatting partitions larger than 32Gb (or is it 64Gb? I forget) is because above that size, things start to get rather wasteful indeed. Of course, you can format the partition under DOS, Linux, or something like Partition Magic, but these days, there really isn't much need for the old dog any more.

 

[unbiased]

Dopefiend,
thanks for the patient answer, dopefiend. Actually since confusednubie 'WANTED' FAT32 partition I gave the advice. There is win98SE bootdisk image available on BOOTDISK.COM , using which a bbotup floppy can be made,which recognizes discs bigger than 64GB.

Keyboardcaper,

win98 bootdisk for >64GB is available.

 

[overclock]

Send the drive to me and I'll fix it the way you want it.

 

[Confusednewbie1552]

No thanks you overclock Everyone answered my question, thanks everyone and I wish there was some way to repay you guys =)

 

[McMadman]

dopefiend:

just a few minor corrections
fat32's "standard" cluster size is 32kb (64+ was only doable on NT (3.51 or 4, not sure which) for a drive 32gb or greater, 32gb being the cutoff point in windows 2K/XP.

The maximum file size fat32 can support is 4gb (some programs may not like files over 2gb however)