Win XP and new hard drive format?

[cookie3]

Ok, I just built new PC. I am using western digitel 120 gig hard drive and win Xp full version oem. booted up with windows cd and partioned the hard drive. then installed xp to C partion at which point windows formatted the C partion for fat32 and installed xp, but it did not format my other two drives. so I went into windows explorer and right clicked on the other drives and selected formatt, but windows will only let me format with ntfs. I don't want this. I Also tried fdisk, I went in deleted the partions I made earlier and started over but for some reason it only saw about 50 gigs of my hard drive so now I don't know what to do. any help would be appreceated...

 

[ojai00]

Go in to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Drive Management. Click the partition that you want to format and you should be able to choose from a list of format options. You should be able to find out where the other parts of the drive went in there also. It should say something like unformatted partition or something like that. Hope this helps.

 

[dbarton]

If your partition is over 32g XP will only let you format NTFS.

I got by it by booting with a win98 disk and using the old fdisk from 98.

 

[cookie3]

thanks ojai00 but it still wont let me use fat32. You must be right about the 32gigs dbarton. I tried fdisk for some reason it only sees half of my 120gig disk. is there a limit to fdisk?

 

[RayEarth]

download the updated fdisk located near the bottom of the site: here it will let you go over the 64GB limit. Just copy this updated fdisk to your win98 bootdisk, bootup and you should be able to create and get a fat32 partition over the 64GB limit.

 

[Poontos]

It's a limit of fdisk and possibly (I did not read all the words in this thread, but you get the idea) FAT32 architecture. Try RayEarth's suggestion.

FAT32 sucks, unless you need to utilize a pre Win2K (Win98, 95, etc.) OS on the same hard drive. No care about sakuratee?

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Format that thing in NTFS for gods sake....There is NO reason to still be using an outdated file system that has been dumped by Microsoft themselves.

 

[cookie3]

Thanks guys great info. I had heard fat32 was better for 3d games, thats why I wanted to use it, but after looking through the internet Ive decided to go with NTFS. Only one problem I have 3 partitions I have formatted the last two Ntfs but my C: drive is fat32.
- how do I convert it to ntfs?

Also I want to put my old win98 hard drive in my new system so I can load things on to my new hard drive.
- Will there be any problem being that one is ntfs and one is fat32?

- ps I downloaded the updated fdisk for the future...

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Faq for FAT32 to NTFS

Using Fat32 and NTFS on same system.

Cheers