Help with format Pretty Please..

nintenjo · 29 Nov 2006 at 11:52

I have a External HDD i am trying to format.. It connects via USB and its 400GB.. Although i have to format it in FAT32 becuase of some issues with a built in media player it has.

How do i format a drive in FAT32 in windows XP? It only displays NTFS formatting options... And fdisk cant be run from a CMD prompt.

rpstewart · 29 Nov 2006 at 12:02

While you can have a 400Gb FAT32 partition due to some obscure, probably marketing driven, decision MS have decreed that XP cannot format anything bigger than 32Gb as FAT32.

You may need to use something like Partition Magic to do this.

nintenjo · 29 Nov 2006 at 12:23

rpstewart said:
While you can have a 400Gb FAT32 partition due to some obscure, probably marketing driven, decision MS have decreed that XP cannot format anything bigger than 32Gb as FAT32.

You may need to use something like Partition Magic to do this.

Any free ones i can use? I dont really want to pay for partition magic to format the drive.

james32 · 29 Nov 2006 at 12:50

Fdisk on a floppy
partion the drive into 2 partions 30gb and 370gb
then format 30gb with fdisk should be fat32 as its under 32GB

nintenjo · 29 Nov 2006 at 13:10

james32 said:
Fdisk on a floppy
partion the drive into 2 partions 30gb and 370gb
then format 30gb with fdisk should be fat32 as its under 32GB

But i need the whole drive to be 1 partition 400GB of FAT32..