FORMATTING LARGE DRIVES
I can buy a new disk (say 40GB), install Win9x, W2K, NT40, XP, boot, see and use the entire drive w/o partitioning no problem. However, the problem starts when I want to reformat and rebuild a large disk.
I’m looking tofind a format utility that will reformat drives (20,40GB…) as one bootable FAT32 partition just as they are configured when new. Win98 & XP support large drives, but the WIN-DOS utilities limit the primary partition to about 8GB (I believe).
I decided to rebuild and reconfigure and older system but ran smack into these limitation problems. I bought the latest version of On-Tracks’ disk manager which formatted a 40GB drive in FAT32, but was not bootable and installed an overlay which I did not want. In the end I had to use the WIN-DOS utils to install the o/s – NT40 in this case and can’t get rid of the overlay (anyone know how?). NT40 had been running on this 40GB drive before without partitions.
So I’m thinking, if the disk manufacturer can format a 40GB drive and have the Windows o/s see and use the entire drive w/o partitions, what disk utilities are they are using? I’ve been looking all over the net, tried various disk manufacturer sites etc – no luck.
I’m planning to rebuild a system running XP Pro on a 40GB disk. I’m thinking of booting from the XP CD and deleting all the files I can from the drive, skip the format, and reloading. Anyone tried this with any success? Any caveats I should consider?
Thanx
