How to format large drive fat32?

[Mr Frances]

I am having a 750GB Western Digital Hard Disk. Now it has two partitions. I have one more hard drive of 80GB which is kept useless. I had formatted the system and installed Windows XP 64bit on it. Now the 750GB can be entirely use for data or backup. I want a 650BG of partition formatted to FAT32. When I try to do that I only shows me NTFS. There is no way I can reformat is back with FAT32. I need some help here. How can I do that. Thanks.

[Illeana]

Why you need such a large size for FAT32 partition. I think it is not a good choice. NTFS offers you a better speed and reliability. And as per my experience Windows XP x64 edition does not support FAT32 partition. FAT is only helpful if you are willing to run or access the drive from dos mode. While it is not at all needed. Your 650GB space will be quiet wasted if you are willing to make it a FAT partition.

[Eithne]

For that you need Windows bootable drive. I do not think that would be possible to do in Windows XP 64bit. You can simply insert the bootable drive of Windows XP 32bit I think and then format the drive in FAT32. There are third party software that allows you to convert a NTFS partition in FAT, but that really does not work well. There are less chances that your drive will be stable enough. And also remember one thing the FAT32 option is only shown one time when you format the disc to NTFS.

[Han$naH]

There is a way but that is a bit time consuming. You can try Vmware for the same. Install Vmware in your system. Ample of 64bit processor supports virtualization. Install Windows XP on it and then connect the drive. I am talking about Windows XP 32bit here. Then go on Device Management and delete all the partition of that drive. Again right click and create a new with FAT32 format. There are some third party software that allows you do that, but for reliability stuff you must use Linux or Windows bootable disc.

[Flynnl]

You can try a Windows 98 system for that. It can allow you to format a drive in a FAT32 format. There are third party software but to some extent I do not believe in the stability. And even if you found a option to convert the partition to FAT I think there is some limitation. I am not sure whether you will get that much bigger size just instantly.

[Toby-Martin]

I had a old system in which there was a external storage attached. It was also a 750GB hard drive. When I formatted that full for FAT32 the system crashed. It looks FAT has certain limit of file size and I do not know how to do it. Even in Windows 98 it is a pain to format a drive. The best thing to try is using a Linux disc. There are many GUI based edition of Linux that you can try. Just create a bootable disc and format the entire partition in the format you want. It is the best way of formatting and it is also very reliable.

[Abdulmajid]

I can provide you a much better way of doing that. There is a size limit of 32GB for FAT and FAT32 partitions. As it is not as reliable as compared to NTFS. So if you are still willing to get that much space on FAT platform then you can do that in Windows using cmd. There are some simple commands that you need to run. To fix the same click on Start > Run and type cmd. In that type format /FS:FAT32 nameofdrive:. In the place nameof drive, type the drive letter. It can be D or F. Check the same in My Computer. You must keep the drive attached and this process is going to take really long time. Second thing it will format the entire drive to FAT32. Then you can through Disk Management shrink the volume and get extra partition out of that.

[GARTH]

Try Slackware. That would help.This is a Linux OS that can offer you more stability in managing system partition. I always format or work on my data back on this. It is not complicated to configure it. You can get the completely manual from web and use the same. You just need to dual boot your system. In Slackware you can modify the secondary drive and get the partition that you want.

[Taidje]

There are some software that you can download from web. This software designed to format any drive in FAT32 format. One of them is FAT32format. It is a very basic tool and works quiet nicely. You can simply use this to create a single or multiple partitions.