Partition problem

[duydaman]

Hello. I have a 120/70 partition on my 200 gig WD hard drive. I just formatted my 120 and XP is running well on NTFS. But my 70 which was on FAT32 is now not responding anymore. Everytime I try to go in a folder in my 70 gig partition it says "D:\ folder is not accesible. The sephamore time period has timed out ". I can't retrieve any of the files from this drive. I tried to format it in dos by typing format D: but it would not let me, it said the drive was too large to format in FAT32. Any idea how I can format this drive to NTFS?

Thanks guys,

Duy

 

[Vector_One]

Try openning the command prompt and typing:

CONVERT D: /fs:ntfs

This will convert the partition to NTFS.

If this doesn't work, I'd buy a copy of Partition Magic. Because FAT32 drives cannot be created by Windows bigger than 32GB. They can be created by Partition Magic bigger than that, though. PM is worth every penny. It's a fantastic program.

 

[duydaman]

Thanks

 

[Vector_One]

Did the CONVERT command work?

I accidently wrote C: in the command, when it should have been D:. I fixed it in the above post.

 

[Mainframeguy]

Errrr.... can I butt in on this thread? It's kinda not OT though, because I recently (yesterday) got a new machine with XP Pro pre-installed and the main drive is a 120GB Maxtor and they formatted it all as FAT32, either that or it was shipped that way.

Now I have partition magic, though not installed on my pro machine yet and I also have another 80 GB Seagate I am putting in.

Would anyone like to advise me best partitioning selection and whether to stick with the FAT32 I got? I've given it some thought, but you guys have probably "been there, done that"!

 

[GoNz0]

thread hijack spotted

i wouldnt use PM to do the 80 or the 120gb Mainframeguy. disk managment has a wizard that will kick in the 1st time you open it with a new drive installed. NTFS all the way kiss goodbye to scandisk. convert your main to NTFS and format the 80 as NTFS. you may want to make a 70gb main partition and the remaining space at the center of the disk (the fasest part) partition in NTFS as a paging file drive.

anyway pop the 80 in and go
control panel / admin tools / computer managment / disk managment

 

[Vector_One]

Use NTFS file system. You can see, from duydaman, that FAT32 partitions on NT based operating systems only cause problems. Plus NTFS gives you far more security features. You can lock down certain files or folders, allowing only you access to them, or only a certain group access (admins, power users, etc.). There's really no reason to use a FAT32 file system on any of your drives if you're running XP/2000.