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Old July 9th 07, 05:04 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
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Default cannot format NTFS to Fat32

sillyputty wrote:
I'm building a win98 box and want to use an old 2GB HD that was on a
winXP system. The drive was formated NTFS and I can't get it to
reformat to Fat32. During Win98 setup it says the drive needs
formating, but neither the fdisk or format commands will work. Fdisk
says: "No fixed disks present" and format says: "format not supported
on drive C:"


Ok, the second message first. You're not going to be able to format a
disk that you've booted from. I'm not sure what you're doing, but
that's the message you'll get if you attempt that. Boot from a floppy
disk that has fdisk and format (bootdisk.com probably has what you need.)

As for the first message, I would recommend disconnecting all hard
drives, except the one in question, and booting from your floppy disk.
Run fdisk. Can you see the hard drive? If you can't check your cabling
and jumpers. Still can't see it? If it's still a non-starter, get
diagnostic tools from the hard drive's manufacturer--generally on a
bootable floppy.

If you can see it in fdisk, drop all the partitions. Create a new
partition that spans the entire drive. (2 GB is ok for win98, but I
wouldn't mess with anything less.) At that point, you should be able to
drop out of fdisk and format the drive.

Oh, when fdisk starts up, say "Y" to Enable Large Drive Support?