Well I just bought a second hand harddrive (possibly screwed)

and I got an external case for it. I plug it in, windows recognizes it and thats it, it dosent show up in my computer or anything. Im about to tear open my case to plug it in there to see if its the external enclosure but I doubt it as that was new.

any ideas on what else would be the problem would be great

well I popped it in to my PC and nothing came up but, when i went to manage My Computer, it asked if I wanted to format the new drive. All dandy it seems to work now, but when I put it in the external enclosure i want it to be fat32, is there anyway windows will format it that way? in the wizard it only let me do NTFS

How big is it?

300gb label, 279gb real

so you have a drive letter for hard drive right? like you can access it from my computer?

well if your hard drive does have a letter than go to command prompt

Start -> Run, "cmd"

then "format <drive letter> /FS:FAT32" ex "format C: /FS:FAT32"

i think that should work

is 300gb too big for fat32? dont want to corrupt it

The following limitations exist using the FAT32 file system with Windows 2000 and Windows XP:

Clusters cannot be 64 kilobytes (KB) or larger. If clusters were 64 KB or larger, some programs (such as Setup programs) might calculate disk space incorrectly.

A volume must contain at least 65,527 clusters to use the FAT32 file system. You cannot increase the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that it ends up with less than 65,527 clusters.

The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).

The ScanDisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 is a 16-bit program. Such programs have a single memory block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, the Windows 95/98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses 4 bytes, so ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the FAT32 file system that defines more than 4,177,920 clusters (including the two reserved clusters). Including the FATs themselves, this works out, at the maximum of 32 KB per cluster, to a volume size of 127.53 gigabytes (GB).

You cannot decrease the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that the FAT ends up larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size.

You cannot format a volume larger than 32 GB in size using the FAT32 file system in Win2K/XP. The Win2K/XP FastFAT driver can mount and support volumes larger than 32 GB that use the FAT32 file system (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create one using the Format tool. This behaviour is by design. Microsoft recommends using NTFS for partitions greater than 32GB.

-- taken directly from the terminal


drives ad0s4, ad1s2, and ad1s1 were all formatted in FAT32 in windows. You can have fat32 partitions larger than 32 gigs.

I formated a 120gb drive in an external case no problem. I thought FAT32 only had a problem if a single file was too big.

you shouldnt have a problem, I have an Acer Ferrari laptop and when it came, for some reason (stupidly) it was formatted FAT32 and it was a 120 GB hdd (112 formatted). so 32 GB isnt the limit, well it MAY have been back in the day but not for a while, maybe thats reminescent of the era when fdisk couldnt do extended size drives?

btw why do you want FAT32 on your drive, out of curiosity?

welll crap




soooo do you have any kind of windows 98 boot disks or anything, i dunno, try barts boot disks. honestly i dont know why you want fat32 anyways

mainly so at somepoint i may want to share media to my 360 (which at the moment is sitting next to my pc anyway). it can only read fat32 partitioned drives. I may just ditch the effort since it seems to work fine they way I got it now

40gb (system)
200gb (media)
300gb (currently empty, not for long)

so a good round 540gb estimated disk space, not counting the 160 in my xbox

600gb of space for under $150, not too shabby

Where in there does it say that 32GB is the limit for a FAT32 partition? It just says you can't make one that doesn't already exist, using Win2k tools. It says nothing about it not being allowed. It definitely doesn't show up as an option for me using the windows format tool on any of my larger drives. I'd like to see a screen shot of someone with a larger drive with FAT32 showing up in the options list of the format tool. That doesn't mean command line formatting either, although if that worked it'd be strange that the GUI version can't do it.

That was taken directly from MS. I've never actually seen it b/c I use NTFS. If its not the case, take it up with MS.