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How do I...format USB ext. 60g H/D with fat32

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Shrum

Shrum

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May 17, 2002
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I have a 60 gig laptop drive in a external USB enclosure that I want to use was a storage drive for ghost images and such.

I'm booting with a Win98 DOS boot disk.

My mobo sees the USB drive at powerup, and FDISK seems to work (I destroyed the NTFS partition on the drive and created the new partition) but I've found that when I attempt to FORMAT the drive, the process starts and then quickly stops and sits at 0% forever (I'm thinking that FORMAT + USB H/W controller aren't playing nice-nice but then again this is my first attempt).

Is there a way to format the USB H/D with Fat32 from DOS?

BTW: Mobo is Asus A8V Deluxe.

TIA

=============================
Sean Shrum
Shrum Consulting
C.A.T.S.: Consulting: Programming: R/C Soaring:
 
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While working with fdisk you are already in dos.
I have had this problem of a hangup in fdisk just as you
described.
First, make sure the hard drive is set at master.
Second, get the diagnostic program from the hard drive mfgrs website and start it up. Inside the program you will find a "write zeros to hard drive" command, something very close to that. Go ahead and click on that. It will take a while to do this job.
After that try again to format fat32 from fdisk.

The other way you could do it would be to get the adaptor that will allow you to use the laptop hard drive on a standard pc ide channel. That way, you could temporarily disconnect your current hard drive from your pc, install your laptop hard drive as master on the primary ide channel and then use win98 boot disk and fdisk to format fat32. You may still have to run the diagnostic i described above and do the "write zeros to hard drive" in order for the hard drive to be formatted fat 32.
The write zero will give you a new, good master boot record for your laptop drive. Thats why it works.



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I1thought about the whole adapter thing too but at present don't have a adapter...then again, being a PC consultant, I should probably get one for my toolkit.

This might be the way I have to go but I'd rather be able to do this natively within the enclosure.

Oh well...

Like I mentioned before, me thinks this be a USB H/W controller foopha but I'm not a digital logics guy so I tend to step lightly in this area.

Doh...I just realized that the netboot disk that I use (Brad's) has something that allows it to see NTFS partitions. I'll look into this option first and worst case come back to this if that doesn't pan out.

Thanks for the info.

=============================
Sean Shrum
Shrum Consulting
C.A.T.S.: Consulting: Programming: R/C Soaring:
 
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Why not try running the hard drive diagnostic and run the "write zero" program while its still in the box.
If you can use the win98 boot disk to get to dos, then you can take the boot disk out and put in the diagnostic program and run it from dos, on a floppy, same as the win 98 boot disk on floppy. And leave the hard drive in the enclosure.
It might work.


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Can you not attach this USB external drive to a computer with a USB port that's running W2K or XP? If yes, then go to Disk Management and partition and format it from there.

ROGER - G0AOZ.
 
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I didnt mention that as i forgot if you can format as fat32 from disk management, but, sure, it usually gives you that choice when its a usb drive. I should know, i only have 4 thumb drives and 4 usb and firewire drives on my pc here, lol.

So theres another way of doing it.


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The problem, that you might experience, is that disk management in 2000/XP is limited to 32GB partitions for FAT32.

Also, to answer your original question, you cannot format a USB drive using a 98 boot disk. The reason is because the driver for the USB drive must be loaded. Unless you can find a way to load a DOS driver for it, it's not going to work. If you do find a way, then the 98 boot disk would be the better option (actually only option) if you just want one large 60GB partition.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884
 
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Sounds like getting it on an ide channel and using win98 boot disk and fdisk is the way to go.
You need only get the adapter and we should have one on hand anyway.


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:cdogg
That depends on the mobo, all my mobo can be sett to use the usb2 drives as floppy's, hard drives or cdroms, no problems to boot. You can set that up in the bios. My biggest drive in a usb enclosure is 300 Gbytes. Formated with a win98se boot disk,could not install an xp os on it, but will boot in win98 or win me. For some reason XP does not like to boot from usb drives.
Regards

Jurgen
 
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Therein lies one of my problems...Formatting thru disk management (at least on my system - WinXp Pro SP2) only gives me the option of NTFS...no Fat32.

Might be because of the partition...Ah ha!

Needed to partition it down < 32 gigs. Now I have the option of Fat32

Thanks for the reminder.

=============================
Sean Shrum
Shrum Consulting
C.A.T.S.: Consulting: Programming: R/C Soaring:
 
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Jurgen,
Didn't realize that. I know I've had problems myself formatting USB drives in "true" DOS with a 98 boot disk in the past. I had to use Windows to format it. It could have just been a compatibility problem with the drive I was using though.

So that would raise an interesting question...[blue]Does the Win98 DOS boot disk include support for USB?[/blue] It doesn't matter if your BIOS treats it as a floppy or hard drive, the OS (in this case DOS) must still be able to see it as well.

I realize Win98 supports USB, but in this question we're talking about DOS, which is why I'm asking the question...

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884
 
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I dont think the original win98 boot disk includes support for usb, but that is a good question. So maybe its a function between the chipset on the motherboard and the bios?


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Right, I'm wondering if support through the BIOS/chipset to the device gets around the need for a driver in the OS. My gut instinct is telling me "No, it shouldn't work!".

For example, there's no way you can format or load XP on an SATA drive without loading the SATA driver during setup. It doesn't matter if the BIOS sees the drive or not.

If someone has some insight on this, I would be most interested.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884
 
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My gut instinct tells me it does work thru the bios/chipset. Why? Because i cant think of any other way, lol. There arent a lot of ways that it can work, are there?



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I guess i should have said: Dont ask me, you already know 100 times what i know. And i'm not kidding around either!




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Well, you have to think about it this way. When you install a PCI or AGP card in a PC (i.e. graphics), the BIOS might see it fine. You might even be able to change some of its settings/features. But as soon as you go into Windows, you've got to load the driver before you can use it properly.

It's the same thing here. USB is built into Windows. Most of the time, you don't have to load a USB driver to use a USB device. But what I'm not sure about is Win98's version of DOS. Without basic USB support, DOS might not be able to see the USB drive unless a compatible driver is manually loaded. That's my thinking anyway...

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884
 
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Maybe the dos support is built into the bios?
I was hoping you had the answer, lol.
But i dont see where usb support is built into a win98 boot disk. So must be what i was originally thinking, that its between the bios and the onboard chipset. Somewhere in there must be the support for usb so that one can run it from dos using a win98 boot disk. That is, with the proper motherboard as jurgen suggested.
So its either in the bios or the motherboard chipset, or the right combination of the two.
Would that have anything to do with enabling dos usb support in the bios? Seems like it must.



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cdog
garebo
As I said before, once I set it up in the Cmoss no problems at all to format a usb2 drive with a win98SE disk. Also all operating systems apart from XP can boot from the USB2 drives. I have 5 of them here they all boot ok in dos, win98, winme win2000. However not in xp, they start to boot and then just hang for ever after. With regard to the formating of usb drives with a win98SE floppy. It could very well be a combination of the bios setup, I have here 3 Asus 4p800E special edition mobos, they all accept it. Also another machine uses the Intel 875db bord, again no problem. But the 875 and the 865 chipsets are of course very similar. I even by accident flashed one of the 865 mobos with the 875 code. It did work only the overclocking functions did not show up.

So both of you could be correct, it probably is a function of the cmoss and chipsets.
Regards

Jurgen
 
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I forgot to mention. Legacy USB support has to be enabled in the bios, otherwise no go.
Regards

Jurgen
 
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