Formatting large Hard Drives

[p4man2.4]

hi,


I just bought a maxtor 200gb 7200rpm, 8mb cache, 133 interface. when partition the drive, and then try to format it in FAT32 It say drive to big. but with NTFS there is no problem. IS there any way to format it in fat32? my partiton sizes are 55gb,137gb. becuase fat32 better for gaming the NTFS. Ntfs has more options thus makeing it a little slower.


using windows 2000 sp3


thanks in advance!!!

[b00bie]

Originally posted by p4man2.4
hi,


I just bought a maxtor 200gb 7200rpm, 8mb cache, 133 interface. when partition the drive, and then try to format it in FAT32 It say drive to big. but with NTFS there is no problem. IS there any way to format it in fat32? my partiton sizes are 55gb,137gb. becuase fat32 better for gaming the NTFS. Ntfs has more options thus makeing it a little slower.


using windows 2000 sp3


thanks in advance!!!

Well, the theoretical maximum for FAT32 is supposed to be 2 terabytes, but that also depends on your system. The limitations are set either by the BIOS for large disks, or by OS. From what I hear, Win95's FDISK goes insane if you try to run it on a drive bigger than 64GB and Win2K can't format a FAT32 drive larger than 32GB. :(

But to tell you the truth, I never had any experiance with that since my laptop has Win2K but formated under NTFS. I have a FAT32 partition here where my Linux runs, but I also have XP on this machine.

[jnd3]

I actually saw a bit of a speed boost in games and other apps when I went from FAT32 to NTFS in 2000SP3.

According to Microsoft, it's a limitation of the file system:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;184006

So you can either give yourself six partitions (to stay below the magical 32 GB limit) or convert to NTFS.

From http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1227&PHPSESSID=18eb75a88a5b39147acb75da7f3a6a31

NTFS and FAT32 are very similar in speed, but as the size of the disk increases, the gap widens. NTFS actually stores small files in the Master File Table (MFT), to increase performance. Rather than moving the heads to the beginning of the disk to read the MFT entry, and then to the middle or end of the disk to read the actual file, the heads simply move to the beginning of the disk, and read both at the same time. This can account for a considerable increase in speed when reading lots of small files.

My suggestion: use NTFS and keep your partitions as they are. It's a better file system.

Cheers,
JND

[EciDemon]

My Seagate barracuda 80GB drive is formated as Fat32 (so I can access it from win98se) and it works good. I did use Partition magic.

It should be noted that I formated the disk with NTFS at first then later on converted it to Fat32 before I installed Win98se

[Jan Kivar]

I'd say just get a Win98SE bootdisk (from www.bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com)), and format the partitions to FAT32. I think You could run into troubles with the larger partition.

Cheers,

Jan

[Nutty]

Hmmmm my 60gig 2nd drive is all 1 partition, and I use 2k. Works fine. Though when I formatted it ages ago, the pc always hung aroudn 90-odd %.

Never heard of any such 32gig limit in 2k before.

[netviper13]

Does anyone know if the latest Linux distros of, oh say, Mandrake or Redhat support NTFS writing safely? I know they can read NTFS, but there was a long-standing corruption issue if you tried to write to an NTFS-formatted partition from Linux.

[The Baron]

Well... I think it's still "experimental." That can be interpreted in any number of ways, really..

[Greg]

If you must use FAT32, you will have to use a 3rd party format program, or leave it formated by the manufacturer. Dos and Windows versions will only format to about 30gb partitions. I had a 80gb factory formated WD HDD a while back and didn't own any programs that could reformat it after a BIOS issue corrupted the data. I ended up using NTFS which is the better choice anyway.

[Steppy]

Originally posted by Greg
If you must use FAT32, you will have to use a 3rd party format program, or leave it formated by the manufacturer. Dos and Windows versions will only format to about 30gb partitions. I had a 80gb factory formated WD HDD a while back and didn't own any programs that could reformat it after a BIOS issue corrupted the data. I ended up using NTFS which is the better choice anyway. DOS didn't support FAT32 nor did win95 or win95A, but 95B, 98, 98SE, could format large FAT32 partitions with ease(not sure about ME, but I believe it could format them too). MS put an artificial limit in XP(and 2k, but I'm not positive on that one)of 32 GB. I assume they did this to "encourage" people to leave FAT32 behind. Unless you absolutely need a FAT32 partition, use NTFS as it is a much better file system.

[PsychoSy]

Originally posted by p4man2.4
[B]IS there any way to format it in fat32? my partiton sizes are 55gb,137gb. becuase fat32 better for gaming the NTFS. Ntfs has more options thus makeing it a little slower.

Let me be honest with you, and I'm sure AshG or anyone else can probably back me up on this as a simular question was asked earlier this week at Nforcers HQ's forums.

Your best bet for those partitions is NTFS all the way. First off, about 90% of those options that slow down NTFS can be disabled (at least they can in WinXP and I don't see how Win2K would be much different). Secondly, even if you couldn't disable them, partions larger than 32GB perform so much better in NTFS that it pretty much reduces the performance hit by those options to nil, sometimes in the negatives! :D

NTFS on those partitions would literally FLY! :afro:

[Greg]

Originally posted by Steppy
DOS didn't support FAT32 nor did win95 or win95A, but 95B, 98, 98SE, could format large FAT32 partitions with ease

You're right. I was meaning the DOS version or command console that comes with >= Win98 when, for exampe, you make a bootable floppy and run format.

[emotionstation]

Just use a 98SE bootdisk, and partition/format the drive.

It'll say it's ~80GB under the fdisk utility, but when it actually boots into windows, it'll show the entire drive.

I used a 98SE bootdisk to format my 1200JB WD drive. Worked fine.