Making a FAT32 partition on a WD Laptop External HDD?

[[]V[]essenjah]

Ok, my car can run mp3's off from an HDD as long as it is FAT32. So, I bought a 120GB laptop HDD to replace the 4GB flash drive I am using. Figuring on making 40GB's FAT32 and and the remainder of the drive NTFS for backing up data.


Well, I bought a Scorpio Western Digital 120GB SATA laptop HDD and a MASSCOOL external enclosure. For some reason, I can only format to NTFS! But if I try to format my flash drives, it will work fine.


I have looked at a few boot CD's to get this going but just can't seem too. Anyone know of any other way to get this to work?

[Cuda68]

http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/FAT32.htm


Windows XP/2000 FAT32 Formatting Limit
\"While the FAT32 file system can support drives up to a standard theoretical size of 2 terabytes, (it 'can' be jury-rigged under Windows Millennium Edition to support partitions of up to 8 TB), Windows 2000 Professional and XP Professional cannot FORMAT a volume larger than 32 GB in size using their native FAT32 file system.

[Krom]

You might have some luck with the command line format utility, I'm not sure if it is subject to the same limitations or not but it can't hurt to try.
Format D: /FS:FAT32 /Q
Where D: is the drive you wish to format.

[Cuda68]

Did some looking on this and found this site has the answer.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index. ... format.htm

[fliptw]

pop the drive into your machine, and use a win98 boot disc

[Cuda68]

I do not think 98 will support SATA or USB 2.0?

[fliptw]

DOS will. The BIOS is a magical thing.

[Cuda68]

Sweet, learned something new

[Genghis]

My 400+ GB drives are formatted FAT32; I did it using Linux. Just boot your system using a Linux live CD and format your external HDD using fdisk.