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Technical Help & Discussion => Windows PCs & Software: Help, News & Discussion => Topic started by: joudi on September 25, 2004, 02:15

Title: Formatting a Partition Greater than 32 GIGs with FAT32
Post by: joudi on September 25, 2004, 02:15

WindowsXP will only format a partition greater than 32 GIGs as NTFS.

If you want to format it with FAT32:

You can use a regular Win98 Boot disk and use that version of FDISK to create the partition (with Large Hard Drive Support)

Reboot with the same boot disk and format

WindowsXP will then be able to use the partition with no problems

Title: Re:Formatting a Partition Greater than 32 GIGs with FAT32
Post by: Sandra on September 25, 2004, 02:27

In addition to that Joudi, did you know that if you only have XP without SP1 that XP cant "see" more than 137 gig.
So if you have an original non SP1 XP cd and install to a new 160, 200 or 250 gig drive, it will only see the drive as 137 gig.
In this situation you have to create a partition to install XP onto which is smaller than 137 gig and then when you install SP1 or SP2 you can format the remainder of the drive as its full size  :)

Title: Formatting a Partition Greater than 32 GIGs with FAT32
Post by: Mac on April 07, 2006, 20:13

XP will format partitions smaller than 32GB with NTFS but will not format a partition which is bigger than 32Gb with FAT32.

To get over the 137GB limitation you can slipstream your XP CD with AutoStreamer 1.0 or nLite adding SP2.

Both of these freeware programs make an .ISO file from which to burn an XP SP2 CD.

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