Partitioning FAT32 external hard drive ??

I am running a Win ME system with FAT32 files and have bought a 500Gb
external drive which is partitioned as a single 500Gb FAT32 drive. I want to
partition it as 5 - 100Gb partitions. Can I do this? I have seen information
that 32Gb is the maximum size partition or 127Gb is the max. Already set up
at 500Gb so neither seems right, can you tell me what is right? Also a
question about what type of partition to use. Primary, Extended or
Logical....... what should I use, why and how?

What tools will you be using to partition it ?
Joan

Dimwit wrote:
I am running a Win ME system with FAT32 files and have bought a 500Gb
external drive which is partitioned as a single 500Gb FAT32 drive. I
want to partition it as 5 - 100Gb partitions. Can I do this? I have
seen information that 32Gb is the maximum size partition or 127Gb is
the max. Already set up at 500Gb so neither seems right, can you tell
me what is right? Also a question about what type of partition to
use. Primary, Extended or Logical....... what should I use, why and
how?

Joan Archer wrote:

What tools will you be using to partition it ?

Win Me's FDISK should work provided that the motherboard bios or disk
controller has 48 bit LBA support which given that it is an external drive
it probably does.
--
Mike M

You are potentially going to hit problems as Win Me simply cannot handle
drives with 128GB as it doesn't support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing
(LBA) . Large drives such as this are best used with XP SP2 or later.
Whilst 48 bit LBA was introduced with XP SP1 this contains a few bugs that
weren't fully corrected until SP2.

You might get away with partitioning the disk in the way you suggest (I
suspect you will find that your 500GB is more like 465GB or so, blame
marketing). You can only have a maximum of four partitions in the
partition table for any drive one of which can, if required, be an
extended partition which can then divided or partitioned into a number of
logical volumes or drives. So to have five partition or volumes you would
need to partition the disk to either have three primary and one extended
partition containing two volumes or have no primary partitions and a
single extended partition which is then divided into five logical volumes
or drives. You can use Win Me's FDISK to do the partitioning.
--
Mike Maltby
MS-MVP Windows



Dimwit wrote:

I am running a Win ME system with FAT32 files and have bought a 500Gb
external drive which is partitioned as a single 500Gb FAT32 drive. I
want to partition it as 5 - 100Gb partitions. Can I do this? I have
seen information that 32Gb is the maximum size partition or 127Gb is
the max. Already set up at 500Gb so neither seems right, can you tell
me what is right? Also a question about what type of partition to
use. Primary, Extended or Logical....... what should I use, why and
how?

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:02:00 -0700, Dimwit

I am running a Win ME system with FAT32 files and have bought a 500Gb
external drive which is partitioned as a single 500Gb FAT32 drive. I want to
partition it as 5 - 100Gb partitions. Can I do this? I have seen information
that 32Gb is the maximum size partition or 127Gb is the max. Already set up
at 500Gb so neither seems right, can you tell me what is right? Also a
question about what type of partition to use. Primary, Extended or
Logical....... what should I use, why and how?

I'll be setting up a 500G as primary(32G NTFS) + extended(2G FAT16,
large FAT32, 8G FAT32) soon, and routinely do similar with 200G to
400G HDs. The trick is to use a compitent partitioning tool.

Even the "best" FDisk is limited at 137G, with the input fields
limiting size values to 99G.

XP's partitioner is useless, as it is this that limits FAT32 size to
32G (rather than anything inherent in FATxx as such).

So I use BING (www.bootitng.com) without installing it to HD, i.e. in
"partition management" mode, and that is sweet.

OTOH, I'm not at all sure how safe WinME will be 137G, and/or
whether 137G volumes on a 137G physical HD will be OK.

Standard partition table limits you to 4 partitions, and if WinME
can't "reach" 137G within an extended partition to find the logical
volumes there, then you'd need to use only primary partitions and thus
more than 4 of them. BING can do that, but only by installing it and
relying on its "special" code to manage the non-standard partition
table. That's an uneasy route for a non-booting HD...

I hope that HD's well cooled?



------------------------- ---- --- -- - - - -
I'm on a ten-year lunch break
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Thanks Mike As this drive came partitioned as one 500Gb partition, which my
computer can see, the controller on the drive must be as you say a 48lba so I
should be able to do a primary, an extended and some logicals to do what I
want. Any comments?? ps I have been unable to get any help from Western
Digital who made this My Book unit as their support staff don't seem to know
how it works,what drivers it uses or what WIn ME is.

"Mike M" wrote:

Joan Archer wrote:

What tools will you be using to partition it ?

Win Me's FDISK should work provided that the motherboard bios or disk
controller has 48 bit LBA support which given that it is an external drive
it probably does.
--
Mike M

Any comments??

As I mentioned previously, Win Me does not support 48 bit LBA even if
supported by the bios and writing to such a disk whilst initially
appearing OK is a disaster waiting to happen with in due course new data
overwriting old. In my pervious post I mentioned that to use such a disk
without worry you need to be running XP SP2 or later. When Win Me was
released in 2000 disk sizes maxed out at 40GB or maybe 60GB and a 500GB
disk was unheard of. Even XP when released in late 2001 was unable to
access such drives with the maximum supported drive size remaining 128GB
(or 137GB decimal) and could only do so with the release of XP SP1 in Sept
2002 and even then this had a few problems which weren't fully fixed until
XP SP2 was released in August 2004.

However since you are referring to an external drive connected using
either USB or firewire it is possible that Western Digital have fixed the
problem internally to the My Book, especially so since they say that its
use is supported on Win 9x systems including Win Me.. I simply don't know
and am not in a position to test. Whilst I have some large external
drives they are formatted using the NTFS filing system and therefore
unusable on my Win Me box.

You mention drivers, I would expect the Win Me to be using its "normal"
disk and usb/firewire drivers, Did you install any drivers supplied by
Western Digital when you first connected the drive?
--
Mike Maltby
MS-MVP Windows



Dimwit wrote:

Thanks Mike As this drive came partitioned as one 500Gb partition,
which my computer can see, the controller on the drive must be as you
say a 48lba so I should be able to do a primary, an extended and some
logicals to do what I want. Any comments?? ps I have been unable to
get any help from Western Digital who made this My Book unit as their
support staff don't seem to know how it works,what drivers it uses or
what WIn ME is.