Dont format a drive Fat32 from within Win XP

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dont format drives with Fat32 from within windows XP: this is what happens found out the hard way If you want to Format a drive with Fat32 download and use the free Windows ME boot disk (www.bootdisk.com) which has support for drives larger than 64 gig / fat32 can handle drives up to 2.2 terrabytes / but DONT make any partitions larger than 137 gigs or there will be drastic conquesnces !!! I would advise not exceeding 100 gig Fat32 partitions just to play it safe !! Windows XP and 2000 format limitation within Windows using Fat-32. If a slave hard drive is added to a system, you can format the drive using Fat-32 file system within Windows (formatting a drive within Windows is very fast - 90 seconds or less). The formatting program built into these versions of Windows has a drive size limitation of 32GB. If you format a drive larger than 32GB in Windows, after the format, only 32GB will be available. This is a limitation of the Windows format component. If you use a boot disk and format with the DOS format utility, the full capacity of the drive will be utilized. To overcome this limitation within Windows XP or 2000, Microsoft suggests changing the file system to NTFS. Fat-32 4GB file size limit The largest file size that be saved to a hard drive is 4GB. The Fat-32 access table cannot store the file pointers for a file larger than 4GB. If a file larger than 4GB has to be stored on the drive, Microsoft suggests changing the file system to NTFS (where possible). ***** addendum****** while Fdisk in Win98 bootdisk only supports partitions less than 64gig in size a Windows ME bootdisk has improved FDISK version which will support making larger partitions on even larger drives however DO NOT use FAT32 on drives which are physically larger than 136 gigs WIN ME does not support 48bit LBA (or does not make use of it ~~ label it what you will) therefore WIN ME fdisk version will not play correctly with partitions made on a drive which is larger than 137 gig (i call it 136 gig for safety) The info available on Fdisk is very misleading / while there are plenty of documented statement of fdisk being able to make partitions and format drives up to 8 terabytes in size it actually CAN NOT perform properly on drives larger than 137 gig becasue of the lack of support for 48bit LBA addressing. After reading a post by Databrain (hard drive section) the other day; I got scared because I have drives at work that are Fat32 and 200 gig in size (fdisk will partition and format them !!!!!!) but this is not a pass or fail adventure !!!!! So I took a spare 200 gig drive and partitioned it and formatted it everyting went smooth then I copied a pile of files from work at average about 2 gig in size until I exceeded 137 gigs of storage then Wham-O !!!!! the file system began overwriting a partition it should not have been writing to !! the end result had that not just been a test of worhtless back-up up data I would have been in a big time jam A complete mess so in summary if you want a dual boot system to access win 98 or ME or you need a fat 32 file system so a swap drive (external drive)can be read in Win 98 or ME environemnt dont use a drive physically larger than 137 gigs !! good luck __________________ Regards: srigopal