cannot format fat32

I had my Drive-1 partitioned to 2oG & 40G. I decided I didnt need 20 for my Boot drive and used Partition Magic to reduce to 10G but was unable to make the Balance 50

I decided to try formatting this partition thru WinXPand then re-try PM on it to make it 50. The format attempt told me I could not format it fat32 ! I don't want to make it NTFS if I can avoid it.

I tried DELTREE to remove all the files and then I formatted it from DOS and before it finished I was told that there was an error and that I should run Scandisk

I did and found no problems there. How on earth can I get that partition into a pure Fat32 state

 

Follow up on my previous post

The message at the end of format is that it is too large to format FAT32

Properties shows: 14G used and 23G free with a total of 37G
The used area consists of severa directories and a lot of files there with bad character names, the reason I want to format it out.

 

I think the XP install CD limits FAT32 to 32Gigs (not sure that's exact value) but you can still format it the old fashioned way using a win98 boot disk.

edit; Yep, 32 Gig it is.