FAT32 format help

[quik1]

Hi all. I need to partition and format a 160gb HDD to use in a div x player. The player only reads FAT32 file system. XP doesnt give you the option to format it to fat32. Is there any other way to format this drive without using my old win98 start up disk and the fdisk command

 

[LazyLion]

Hi all. I need to partition and format a 160gb HDD to use in a div x player. The player only reads FAT32 file system. XP doesnt give you the option to format it to fat32. Is there any other way to format this drive without using my old win98 start up disk and the fdisk command

Where in XP did you try to do it? Under Adminstrator Tools or by right clicking on the drive and choosing format?

do not use Win98 fdisk whatever you do... it will take ages, and the drive will be unreadable. fdisk is not designed for such large sizes.

You might also try a third party app such as Ranish Partition Manager. There are a number of free tools on the Emergency Boot CD or Hiren's Boot CD. Any one of them should be able to format with FAT32.

Which divx player do you have?

 

[Gambit]

win98 can only create fat32 partitions up to 137gb. can the divx player not format the drive? Most pvr type machines i have seen have a format function. If not try get hold of partition magic or maybe boot from a linux live cd.

 

[quik1]

Which divx player do you have?

Its a Woxter

I created 2 partitions - 2 X 65Gb.
I eventually used ultimate boot cd - used Seagate disk tool that i found on the disk.

Thanks for the replies though.

 

[Artagra]

There are a few utilities that will let you do this on XP:

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
http://www.google.co.za/search?q=fa...s=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

Or buy a mac OS-X can format Fat32 natively without the size limitations.

 

[Ou grote]

Hi all. I need to partition and format a 160gb HDD to use in a div x player. The player only reads FAT32 file system. XP doesnt give you the option to format it to fat32. Is there any other way to format this drive without using my old win98 start up disk and the fdisk command

Swissknife works.

But a Fat32 drive over 32 gigs will need to be backed up somewhere, not the most reliable system.

 

[Kalvaer]

I just recently read a post on the net about how to do it since I was wanting to do the same with a 500 gig HDD to use on my Xbox. I just ended up sharing it though through my PC and streaming it to the Xbox.

I'll try find the post again, but I think it mentioned something about "partition magic"

 

[nihilist]

You can use Ranish partition manager to format it, or Linux or Gparted.
They're on the Ultimate Boot CD.
Ultimate Boot CD (Contains Ranish Partition Manager + others)
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Ranish itself:
http://www.ranish.com/part/

Gparted
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

 

[bdt]

+1 for Gnome Partition Editor, whether as a mini liveCD, liveUSB (now that's just great planning) or as part of a REALLY handy liveCD to keep around.

 

[LazyLion]

Formatting... to FAT32
SwissKnife is your all-in-one formatting tool! Also does large capacity FAT32 volumes... (seems to be limited to 500 GB)
http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm
For drives larger than 500GB, use this rather... can handle most interfaces...
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

 

[Dimpie (JIGSAW)]

Disk Management - You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select "New Partition" and follow these steps, clicking "Next" to get move on at each stage.

1. Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
2. Select Primary Partition.
3. Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
4. Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
5. Select "Do not Format this partition"
6. There will be a dialog box, summarising all the previous stuff. Click Finish

Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter

Now download a copy of fat32format. Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:\. Click Start->Run and enter cmd. CD to the where you extracted the fat32format exe, e.g. by typing CD /D c:\

Now you're almost done.

Type this

fat32format f:

You should see this displayed

Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)

Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros.

Assuming you don't bail out at this point you should see something like this -

Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure
(y/n) :y
Size : 250GB 488392002 sectors
512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size 32768 bytes
Volume ID is 1bdb:2c1d
32 Reserved Sectors, 59604 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats
7629261 Total clusters
7629260 Free Clusters
Formatting drive f:...
Clearing out 119304 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster...
Wrote 61083648 bytes in 0.988463 seconds, 61796609.106193 bytes/sec
Initialising reserved sectors and FATs...
Done

This means that all has gone according to plan. It should take about 4 seconds per Terabyte to format the disk. You can run chkdsk f: at this point if you're curious, and see something like this -

The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume Serial Number is 1BDB-2C1D
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
244,136,352 KB total disk space.
244,136,320 KB are available.

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
7,629,261 total allocation units on disk.
7,629,260 allocation units available on disk.

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