Help -Hard Disk problems with big disks & windows

Post #110,366 by dmarker 7/18/03 1:38:16 PM 7/18/03 2:14:30 PM Reply	Help -Hard Disk problems with big disks & windows I have a Medion computer with a 160GB Seagate Barracuda drive. It came partitioned with a 70GB NTFS a 60GB NTFS & a 20GB fat32. The OS it came with was Win XP Home. I bought 2 x 120GB Barracudas as a 2nd & 3rd disks. and when I put it in the machine it called it a 'volume' wouldn't allow me to parttion it & would only format it NTFS (no option for fat32). I moved it to a Win2K machine & got same problem. Not even Partition Magic would allow resizing them. I then tried the other disk & got same result. I then put the 120 in as master & loaded Linux8 & formatted the disk into 3 partitions then extracted it & put it in Win2k machine - it could see the 3 partitions but wouldn't let me format them (neither disk manager or PM8). Anyone have any suggestions as to what might be going on with these disks ? #2 UPDATE: On the Win2K machine I found that PM8 would let me delete the 3 parttions I had created & then let me recreate & format them as either fat32 or NTFS. On the WinXP machine PM8 corrupted the 120GB disk when I tried running a resize on it to take the 1 partition down from 120GB to 40GB. Am in the process of rebuilding it. #3 - added more detail & corrected a couple of points Cheers Doug Marker Edited by dmarker July 18, 2003, 02:05:03 PM EDT Help -Hard Disk problems with big disks & windows I have a Medion computer with a 160GB Seagate Barracuda drive. It came partitioned with a 70GB NTFS a 60GB NTFS & a 20GB fat32. The OS it came with was Win XP Home. I bought 2 x 120GB Barracudas as a 2nd & 3rd disks. and when I put it in the machine it called it a 'volume' wouldn't allow me to parttion it & would only format it fat32. I moved it to a Win2K machine & got same problem. Not even Partition Magic would touch them. I then tried the other - same result. I then put the 120 in as primary & loaded Linux8 & formatted the disk into 3 partitions then extracted it & put it in Win2k machine - it could see the 3 partitions but wouldn't leet me format them. Anyone have any suggestions as to what might be going on with these disks ? Cheers' Doug Marker Edited by dmarker July 18, 2003, 02:14:30 PM EDT Expand All History \| Collapse All History
Post #110,427 by qstephens 7/18/03 7:31:15 PM Reply	Re: Help -Hard Disk problems with big disks & windows There's a MS KB article about this but the nub is that there's a hard-coded limit of 32 GB for a FAT32 partition. To get around this, FDISK and FORMAT using Windows 98 SE. Oh, and FORMAT under W98SE has a cosmetic bug in that it reports partition size modulo 64GB qts
Post #110,542 by dmarker 7/20/03 7:55:12 AM Reply	Decided to convert all to NTFS ... Am doing a lot of digital video & DVD burning so decided the easy way out was to convert all my main disks to NTFS. I have a few that are in plug-in trays so I can move large volumes of data between servers. Will keep one large SCSI disk for Redhat - est will just have to go to NTFS. Thanks Doug

Welcome to IWETHEY!