Windows:How do I FAT32 format a drive bigger than 32 GIG?

[Belinda Frick]

Download link: http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s ... hl=mkdosfs

Download notes:

Windows XP doesn't let you format a partition with FAT32 if it
is bigger than 32GB.

To do this, first you must create your partition, it is probably
best to use windows disk management to do this.

Right click on My Computer and select Manage. Then select Disk
Management from the left. Now find some unallocated space on one
of your disks. Right click on the unallocated space and select
New Partition.

If your drive is already formated. Check this under My Computer,
right-click on the drive and go to properties, then the General
tab and under file format it says for example NTFS you need to remove
the NTFS partition to get some unallocated space.


*** Please Note: when removing the NTFS partition you will loose all data on the drive. .***

Press next, select primary partition. Press next, enter the size
of your new partition, the number that's in there by default is
the ammount of unallocated space on your disk and thus the maximum
size for the partition. Press next, select a drive letter of your
choice (it can be changed later). Press next, select do not format
this partition. Then press next and then finish.

Now you have a new partition that is not yet formatted.

To format the big partition with FAT32 you have to use Linux mkdosfs
for Windows NT/2K/XP. There might be other ways, but this is what I
used and it worked perfectly. You can download mkdosfs from here:
http://www1.mager.org/mkdosfs/

Download mkdosfs.zip and extract it.

mkdosfs.exe is a command line program so when you extract it put it
somewhere easy to access like C:. Now, press start then run and type
cmd. Now, assuming you put mkdosfs.exe on C: type C:\mkdosfs

That should give you instruction on how to use the program. If it
doesn't then you haven't typed in the path of the program correctly.

To format a partition you must type this into cmd:

C:\mkdosfs -F 32 -n AMTARCHIVE -v <drive letter>

Where is a name of your choice for your new partition
and is the drive letter of the partition you want to
format. *Don't get the drive letter wrong!*

Once you have typed that in and pressed enter, the program should give
you some information about your new partition like this:

mkdosfs 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
Win32 port by Jens-Uwe Mager
\\.\ has 255 heads and 63 sectors per track,
logical sector size is 512,
using 0xf8 media descriptor, with 390716865 sectors;
file system has 2 32-bit FATs and 8 sectors per cluster.
FAT size is 380816 sectors, and provides 48744400 clusters.
Volume ID is 4149e22c, volume label .

It will be unresponsive while it formats the drive, but it only took about
30 seconds to format my 200GB partition.

Note the -F 32 part of the command. mkdosfs can format FAT12 and FAT16
partitions with the relevant command. If you don't include -F 32 then
mkdosfs will use either FAT12 or FAT16 so make sure you do put that bit
on.

So there you go, now you have a FAT32 partition bigger than 32GB that
can be read and written to by many OSes and you didn't even have to
leave Windows XP

[Therlow]

Struggled to get the file. Here is a .rar copy to download.