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cannot format NTFS to Fat32
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:" |
#2
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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? |
#3
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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:" remove the partitions first using: http://www.bootdisk.com/plan10/delpart.zip -- http://www.bootdisk.com/ |
#4
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cannot format NTFS to Fat32
On Jul 9, 4:14 am, 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:" Regarding the fdisk error. Fdisk can have issues viewing and deleting NTFS partitions. Though i've had successes when its been just one partition. Where I think it doesn't work, I got a different error. Anyhow, you've probably run into one of these issues. Regarding the format error. I think Format gives that error, because normally, if you create a partition in e.g. fdisk, then when it comes to formatting it, you can still go to C: , try to type DIR, and it gives an error like "invalid boot media". THat's how it should be. You can do format c: or I suppose, format c: /q, and it'll work. Whereas I think when the partition is NTFS, DOS can't see it at all. And I guess the format command has problems. There are other ways to delete partitions. An easy way, Is to boot up from a win xp cd and use that to delete partitions. I know you're not installing win xp, but you can still use the win xp setup to do that. Then just quit the setup once the partition is deleted otherwise, it's finding some other software to do it. maybe some little freeware prog somebody mentioned. Or a linux boot disk Or plugging the hard drive into another machine, not booting from that hard drive, and deleting the partition from e.g. win xp disk management. You could do that quicker with a usb-ide adaptor, then you don't have to open the machine. win xp cd seems ideal if you have one lying around. I don't think i've used it for that myself, but one could, and I prob would if fdisk wasn't doing it. Or even anyway.. If I was more into linux i'd just use a linux boot disk. |
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