Formatting Large Hardrives

[redbirdrs4]

Hi All You guys and Gals

Have a question I bought and EZ Bus DT Usb Backup system I'm running Win 2000 Pro and I want to format in FAT32 Oh! I for got to mention I bought a 250GB harddrive with it and I need to format it before using.How Cant I do this with the FAT 32?????? HELP I NEED THID INFO PLEASE

[confus-ed]

You can format it all for FAT32, not easily but you can ..

Syntax of Format (that's an xp article but it ought to be the same)

Then you want to read this, Size Limitations in NTFS and FAT File Systems (where M$ tell you 'some lies' about why 32gb is the limit as far as they are concerned for xp & w2000)

The simplest answer is to partition it up (but that'll mean 8 partitions for a drive that big !!) - I suppose I'd better ask you what you are wanting this for, before I start telling you about changing cluster sizes & such ..

[ironwill99]

The easiest way to do it is to get a copy of Symantec's Partition Magic. If you are looking for a free method you can plug the drive directly into a PC and use an updated Win98 boot disk with a fixed version of fdisk to partition the drive and then use the format command. It will take awhile to complete but it can be done.

[confus-ed]

The easiest way to do it is to get a copy of Symantec's Partition Magic. If you are looking for a free method you can plug the drive directly into a PC and use an updated Win98 boot disk with a fixed version of fdisk to partition the drive and then use the format command..

Partition Magic won't necessarily do it right if you use partitions .. (can't reconcile cyclinder boundaries with partition boundaries correctly unless the partitions are already correctly positioned by something else first - I believe the lastest version does this right at last but here's an updated fdisk (link swiped from www.bootdisk.com ) like mentioned just in case it still doesn't ..)

& once you get past say 100meg or so with a FAT volume, the file allocation table itself can get sooooo biiii-g that performance will slow to a practical crawl renedering it practically unusable by 200meg or so if you don't use larger cluster sizes to limit the number of entries written to the FAT (& you need to then think about 'slack' which in this context is wasted disk because of larger cluster sizes).

This is pretty good at showing the inter-relationships between cluster size, number of entries in fat, partition size & performance.

[redbirdrs4]

I'm using it to store music and pictures and such and i'm going to use part of it to load games on.

[redbirdrs4]

Thanks to all of you that answered my Question ,but I solved the Problem I formatted it all NTFS ..............Thanks again