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WinXP Disk Management

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by cirievans

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I have a 60G IDE Raid as a secondary drive, clean. 30G Third drive with Win XP and Primary 40G WindowsXP drive. Xp will not assign a drive letter or show additional drives in my computer. They are listed in Disk Management shown as online Healthy and active basic Disks. The secondary XP hard drives only option is to delete partion. The raid drive which is unallocated because it will only allow me to format in NTFS, which I do not want, I want Fat 32. I know I can format from dos from scratch but when I boot into XP it won't assign a drive letter to the raid anyway so what is the point. I have spent countless hours in help and research microsoft site. It should be simple, it sure was in all the other OSes. Help, please. I am so behindin my work.

6 replies

by thechas

Don't know if this is much help, but I had no trouble partitioning and formating my drive in XP from the disk management console. I had the option of file formats.

One thought, XP may default to setting up a RAID drive as ntsf since ntsf is a more robust and secure file system than fat.

by cirievans

I have no problem with the primary drive. It is the second and third drives that can not be assigned a drive letter or accessed by the primary XP drive. 60G is over the 32G maximum limit for fat32 and they want to make it a dynamic drive, I wantto keep it as a basic drive. Even if I formatted the secondary raid (stripe) in Fat32 in dos, XP will not let me assign a drive letter and access the disk. The only option XP gives me is delete partition

by cirievans

The problem in not formatting, I can do that. The problem is assigning a drive letter and having My Computer access the additional hard drives. They are just sitting there unaccessible with no drive letters

by phil.hall

WinXP has NO fault tolerance built in, that means, no RAID (as I am told). For RAID you have to wait for the ".NET" replacement that is coming out someday (or the XP Server version, whichever.)

by cirievans

I don't know where your information came from, but XP has virtual raid built in. I am using hardware raid and it is no problem. Raid is not my problem. Assigning drive letters to additional drives is my problem. Thanks for the effort

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