Convert usb external drive to Fat32

3) I note that my XP machine wont let me format it FAT32 either.
Brummig
Because its larger than 32GB, XP limits FAT32 partition creation to 32GB, which I forgot and Zander reminded me of.

jorjab
At this point, uninstall that drive thru Device Manager in XP, un plug the drive, reboot.

Put it back on the 98 system. You wrote you deleted the NTFS partition, lets see how 98 reacts to it now.

Regards - Charles

 

charlesvar
Why does XP limit FAT32 to 32Gb? Is it just XP that has this limit? Surely the workaround isn't FDISK from the Win98 floppy disk?

jorjab
Don't worry about taking the drive out; no-one is suggesting you take it out and leave it out. Unless Maxtor have done something seriously weird, the drive itself has no knowledge of whether it is in a PC, a USB box, or anything else. All it sees in all cases (excuse the pun) is an ATA interface and a power supply. You should even find it has the same connectors as are present on the wiring in your PC. Therefore you can switch it back and forth between PC and USB box as you please. If the matching cables in your PC are long enough, you may even be able to leave the drive in its box. Christer has kindly typed in the details.

If you don't have Linux, you often find (via Google) someone has ported whatever you need to Win32 in one form or another, but try Christer's DELPART suggestion first.

Note that my disk is 152Gb of FAT32. If you want just one big partition (as I did) it can be done, but we need to make sure you're not limited by the tools.

Christer
Why does the logical drive have to be created in an extended partition? Why can't you do it in the primary partition?

 

Hi Brummig,

Why does XP limit FAT32 to 32Gb? Is it just XP that has this limit?
Why I don't know, and I don't know whether 2K or 2003 have the same limit.

Surely the workaround isn't FDISK from the Win98 floppy disk?
Yep I know fdisk will work on an internal drive on an XP system to create a FAT32 partition up to 160 GB in size, know that works because I've done it; Christer is saying it won't work on USB external drives, which I've obviously never tried.

Regards - Charles

 

LOL - thanks Charles.

I wouldn't expect FDISK to work via USB either, since FDISK doesn't need Windows, and without Windows there's no USB. I guess it's worth trying if the next best step is to drop the drive in the bin.

jorjab

I'm going offline for the night now, so if you ask me a question and someone doesn't reply for me, I'll answer it tomorrow morning.

 

[SIZE= "3"]Problem Solved! [/SIZE]

I am glad that the advice from CharlesVar worked
"At this point, uninstall that drive thru Device Manager in XP, unplug the drive, reboot. Put it back on the 98 system. You wrote you deleted the NTFS partition, lets see how 98 reacts to it now. "

I am not into taking PCs apart etc. Only willing to mess via the keyboard and mouse and software. 40 years of my life were spent creating system software for Very large computers, the last 10 of that spent learning all about PCs, mostly self taught, at work mainly by using them for programming the larger computers and linking to them via the PC. Re Hardware: when the Engineers saw me coming they ran, strange things would happen to their machines when I showed up, especially with the prototype ones.

Back to the subject at hand:

What I did was take drive to 98.
Created 1 extended partition for it.
System then verifies the drive integrity. then says no logical drive defined and verifies drive integrity again. At this point has reassigned old Logical Drive H to it. Verifies drive integrity again.

Shutdown, restart, and then formatted the entire thing (went thru some gyrations there because apparently there is something on the drive that 98 and Norton anti-virus think is a boot record). When Norton gave me error, I chose exclude Boot portion and drive is now formatted in FAT32 and read/write capable on 98.

My drive is 40GB. Final format shows used 32KB available 37.2 GB in FAT32 format.

Tried on XP after putting some files on it on 98 and then taking back to XP. Everything now works properly and in FAT32 on portable drive.

Thus the full solution to my problem would be to

- On XP delete the NTFS Partition using Disk Management.
- Uninstall that drive thru Device Manager in XP, unplug the drive,
- reboot XP system.

- Put Drive back on the 98 system.
- Use FDISK on 98 to create one extended partition.
- Format the drive on 98 (exclude any boot information which may or may not be on it. )
- System now tells you to verify everything in order by running full surface scan disk on the drive.
It will now be FAT32. and hopefully everything is in order.


Thank you one and all, and yes I will honor my commitment to become a contributing member.

Jorjab

 

Great! Glad to hear you got it straightened out. Now, I have a question for you. When you used Fdisk on the 98 system, did you run it in a dos window from within windows? I've never tried it and was wondering if you could do it that way or not. Just haven't had enough experience with USB hard drives and was curious how you ran it.

Brummig
One more reason for using a logical partition as opposed to a primary partition. Though I don't know the implications on a USB drive, if this were a regular IDE drive and you made a primary partition on it, it would change all of your drive letters when you booted to windows with it connected. I have no idea what kind of problems it would present on a USB drive but I thought why find out the hard way? Make it a logical partition and you won't have to worry about it. Plus, if you use it on a 9X system, it's not a good idea to have two visible primary partitions. Windows 9X doesn't always like seeing two primary partitions and it can lead to data loss. Not a sure thing but it can cause problems. Why risk it?

 

Glad to hear the problem was sorted.

Christer, Zander

Thanks for that. I think perhaps Christer took my question in the wrong way (my fault - I didn't phrase it well) - I was really asking why, if you wanted just one partition, you couldn't just create a single (primary) partition and be done with, but stopping the drive letters changing around is very useful - something that has caused me much frustration in the past. I know you can create up to four primary partitions on a drive, but until Christer's answer I didn't know they were all called primary partitions.

Is it just Win98 that has the problem with data loss? Is it a Win9x problem? I've not seen it on NT4 (which is what I've used most heavily). XP I've found unstable generally, but maybe this problem is the root cause.

 

Hi Zander,

I've run fdisk from within WinME, but that was before having external drives.

jorjab did run it that way the first time and the last time. If you look at the first problem he encountered, he writes Fdisk on 98 at this point keeps saying that there is no room on the drive. . So fdsik because it was run within 98, was able to recognize the external drive. It was when he tried running from a boot disk, that fdisk by itself wouldn't recognize the external drive.

Running fdisk on an external drive wouldn't work on XP.

Regards - Charles

 

To the best of my knowledge, yes. In the past, for one reason or another, I've booted to win98 with multiple primary partitions visible. I've never had any problem but because of my drive letters all changing I realized it right away and didn't let it run very long this way. Even if I wanted to try nothing would work anyway because of the drive letters all being different.

I've have had no first hand experience of anything bad happening to win98 with multiple primaries showing. I only warn against it because years ago when I first bought Drive Image and Partition Magic, I read the manuals for them from beginning to end. Both of them warned against having multiple primary partitions being visible when running win9x because of the possibility of data loss. I figured they probably knew what they were talking about so I've always heeded the warning. They said nothing about WinNT in this respect that I can remember.

 

I've had quick google and found this:

http://www.allensmith.net/OS/XOSL/III.htm

I think what you read refers to the number of primary partitions on one drive. I know from my tinkering with Linux that, per drive, Win9x will only support one primary partition and one extended partition (allowing you any number of logical drives). FDISK wont let you create more than one primary partition per physical drive, but other partition tools will. Do that on Win9x, and *then* you could lose access to your disk, and therefore access to your data (though the data remains intact). NT and Linux based OS's don't have this limitation (they can have up to four primary partitions).

 

Zander,
Re running FDISK on 98. I did a search in 98 using Win explorer for Fdisk.exe Clicked on that to execute it bringing up DOS window and proceeded from there. Yes, you have to be in 98 initially in order to find the USB drive. That is why boot up in DOS mode not find the drive.

Jorjab

 

Just received this response from my email to Maxtor on how to do it. Took 2 days to get it back but it was Holiday time. Don't know if Maxblast 4 would work on other Manufacturer's drives or not. Should, but you never can tell.

"I would take the drive back to a windows 200 or xp system and do the following. Or you can go to our website at Maxtor.com and download maxblast 4 for windows. Then maxblast 4 would help you wipe drive clean and format and partition drive.
I would use your Disk Management utility within Windows to repartition and reformat the drive. To access Disk Management, right click on My Computer, go to Manage, and then choose Disk Management. Within Disk Management the drive should show in your list of disks (Disk 0,1,2 etc etc). I would delete any partitions that are on the drive. To delete a partition, just right-click on the partition and choose delete. Make sure you’re deleting the correct drive. Once the entire drive says unallocated then the drive should be ready to partition and format. Just right click within the Unallocated Space on the drive and choose the New Partition or New Volume option to set up the drive. "

 

That's just plain wrong. The extended partition isn't assigned a drive letter - the logical drives within it are.

Makes no sense to me.

In the Windows world NTFS isn't what solves the problem - it's NT (which of course has been around for ages). The problem was created by the creaky Windows-on-DOS approach, which is like fitting a modern car with wooden wheels and cartspring suspension. Unfortunately it looks like someone at Microsoft didn't read the FAT32 specification when they limited XP to 32Gb of FAT32 (It's supposed to work up to 2Tb). Since hard disk sizes whizzed passed 32Gb ages ago, we all still have to have a Win98 startup floppy to hand. Some progress!

 

The 32GB limit in XP only affects it's ability to format a hard disk. It can't (won't is probably a better term) format a partition larger than 32GB to FAT32. It can mount and read FAT32 partitions larger than that just fine. Why the limitation in formatting? One can only guess why they did this. Perhaps they decided that anything beyond that is just too inefficient (due to cluster sizes) so that was the way it was going to be. Best guess I can come up with.

 

That would be my guess too, Zander, though if that's the case it makes you wonder why they didn't simply put up a message box warning the user and asking if they wanted to continue (approximately two lines of C).

I do have a darker suggestion. My big FAT32 disk suddenly stopped working one day whilst I was using it on XP. Win98 and Linux were both quite happy working with the disk, but the appropriate Linux tool told me there was an error on it (which for some reason the tool didn't fix even when I told it to). I wonder if MS found there was a problem with big FAT32 disks on XP and "solved" it by limiting the maximum size available with FAT32, assuming most users wouldn't simply partition and format the disk with something else.

 

Depends on the nature of the problem (if there is one). It could be something that happens rarely and for obscure reasons. Preventing XP from creating such a partition would reduce the number of times the problem shows itself. It's all speculation, of course - it could be just a good old fashioned c**k-up in the UI.