Re: Format 500GB to FAT32

Jim wrote:
On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:58:12 +0000, PeeGee <triessuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Jim wrote:
I have an external 500GB hard disc which came formatted to FAT32.

For reasons I won't go into I wanted to reformat the drive.

XP accepted >format m: /FS:FAT32 from the command prompt and
proceeded to (appear to) format the drive. On reaching 100% I
got the message that the volume was too big for FAT32, and left
the old disc structure in place. Took over an hour to do this!

How can this be if the disc is already an FAT32 volume?

If I NTFS format it will it be readable from the command prompt
after (for example) a reinstallation of XP? I would have thought
so as the C: drive is already NTFS. The thing is this external
drive holds my Acronis disc images which have to be readable at all
times.
Using USB, Acronis and the DOS version of Ghost 2003 will quite happily read/write NTFS partitions. However, I tend to use Acronis from the installation CD or BartPE (for the newer chip-sets).

XP has a block on formatting larger disk partitions (>32GB?) as FAT32, though will read/write them, but both Acronis and Ghost will happily restore an empty FAT32 partition of any size to a partition of any size within the FAT 32 limits.

Thanks for the reassurance. I'll format the sodding thing in NTFS.

Still confused as to how it came formatted as FAT32 if there is this
restriction!

Thanks again.


Probably to allow all FAT32 compatible systems to access it (I only switched to XP from 98SE due to the system suddenly becoming slow after a windows update - should I be surprised :-) )

My external USB drive is 250GB and NTFS now (I originally had it as a single FAT32 partition), as I tend to use the Acronis plug-in with BartPE on multiple systems (I initially installed Acronis, but it insisted on running a service all the time, even though I don't do scheduled back-ups).

--
PeeGee

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