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

[Shrum]

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

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[cdogg]

Jurgen,

Is it possible that you downloaded or modified your Win98 Boot Disk? From what I've read on the net and from my experience, the standard Win98 boot disk you make in Windows does not have USB support, which is needed in addition to BIOS/CMOS support. Have a look here:

http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

Some quotes from this page that stand out:

"Note that after you get your business done in DOS with the USB drivers that they really should be remmed out when you've done what you needed to and now want Windows to use the drive correctly using Windows drivers."

To me, that quote seems to indicate that USB is not a default entry in DOS startup files.

"From Carmen (Spain)
I just want to say thanks to ben b. for sharing his experience. I was able to find the files I needed on the Internet and got my usb hard drive to work which did not come with dos drivers."

~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

 

[jurgen36]

:cdogg
I use a standart dos98se floppy. However I checked the Asus manual and found that a USB2 drive is forced to be treated like a hard drive if it has a capacity over 530 Mbytes. If I use a key drive like one of my kingmax 256 Mbyte sticks it is trated like a floppy drive. In other words dos just sees another hard disk or floppy drive depending on the capacity.

I quote from the manual.
When set to Auto, USB devices less than 530 MB will be emulated as floppy drives. Larger drives will be emulated as hard drives. Forced FDD option can be used to force an Hdd formated drive to boot as FDD.
Unquote.

Apparently the mobos shows the OS a hard drive or a floppy drive depending on the settings. So the OS only sees what it expects to see. The conversion is done in the mobo.

I think that might clear the matter up.

I tried just now to install win95. No problems at all, it installed ok from the cd and booted up afterwards. No USB drivers were used. In the My computer the usb drive is shown as a hard drive. Drive C, as I disabled all other drives.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[cdogg]

OK, that helps, but I have a couple more questions.

1) Did you format the USB hard drive from a Win98 bootdisk (DOS) floppy?

2) What version of Win95 are we talking? (Win95 OSRB or later would make sense)

You said Win95 installed to the USB hard drive just fine. But that makes sense since you were installing from CD and Windows setup. That part I don't doubt. This whole discussion is just about formatting from a Win98 DOS disk.

~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

 

[jurgen36]

:cdog
Yes I formated the USB drive from a standart win98se floppy.
Sorry it was win 98se not win95 for the installation, I could not edit it in this section and did not want to make another post. I just tried again to format this time with a dos floppy, not 98 but one of the original dos versions before windows 3 even came out. Of course this time I could only format within the limitations of the original dos disk. I also formated a 160 Gbyte drive with the 98se floppy, transfered the cd files to the formated hard drive and installed from there. Again working completely normal. Apparently the os only sees a hard drive not a usb drive at all. The emulation in the Asus P4P800-e Deluxe bord seems to be working very well indeed. All the os sees is a hard drive. Sorry about the delay but I wanted to check if I could install from the USB drive.

I have not tried a complete installation with the Intel 875 chipset. Formating yes, that works. But I did not do a complete installation as that machine is used as my Linnux firewall and server.
However I also tried to format from a very old OS2 boot floppy, that also worked but again with capacity limitations. The limitations do not show up using win98se, in fdisk I enable large drive support. As the drive was a maxtor I also tried the Maxtor utility. Again it formated ok. But this time of course very fast indeed. So it appears that the mobo emulation works for all OS's very well indeed.
Regards

Jurgen