[AprenticeGeek]

I want to upgrade my win 98 system with a used drive from my xp system. The drive was formatted ntfs. I've refirmatted it but it always comes back as nfts. How can I change it to fat 32?

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Download the latest utilities from the drive manufacturers website. Then low level write "0"s to the drive. The best way i=ve found to format as FAT32 is to use a win 98-ME boot floppy to format the drive. You should be able to also instert the drive as a slave in a XP computer and in disk management format the drive as FAT32. A caveat here is the XP will only format up to 32 gigs in a single partition. Win ME lets you format up to 127 gigs as FAT32 on a single partition. I'm not sure if XP SR2 fixes this problem.

SRX660

[SRX660]

Download the latest utilities from the drive manufacturers website. Then low level write "0"s to the drive. The best way i=ve found to format as FAT32 is to use a win 98-ME boot floppy to format the drive. You should be able to also instert the drive as a slave in a XP computer and in disk management format the drive as FAT32. A caveat here is the XP will only format up to 32 gigs in a single partition. Win ME lets you format up to 127 gigs as FAT32 on a single partition. I'm not sure if XP SR2 fixes this problem.

SRX660

[Neil Jones]

You don't need to low-level format the drive.
Just use Fdisk to rip the partitions out and make new ones. These can then only be FAT32, since FDisk and Format won't work with non-FAT drives.
Or a program like Partition Magic will do the same thing, plus you can format it from in there as well.

FAT32 drives in theory can be up to 2 Terabytes in size, however in reality the computers at the time FAT32 came out couldn't see anything bigger than 32Gb anyway, and by the time you get over 32Gb the amount of wasted space was too great.

You can format a FAT32 partition as big as you need depending on the hardware limitations. 137Gb would seem to be a common barrier but there wouldn't be anything to stop you going over this if the hardware can do it. It'd be a waste, yes, but you can do it.