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Reformat Second Hard Drive 1

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May 7, 2004
14
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Here's my problem... I have two hard drives in my Dell PC. One is a 40 gig drive (C:) which I use for the OS and various other junk. The other drive is an 80 gig (D:), which I use for files that I access often. After a routine reformat and reinstallation of XP Pro on the C:, I went to examine the contents of the D: from within XP and got the message "Drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?" The problem is this - the XP reformat tool showed only 35 gigs for the D: I'm sure that all of the stuff that I had on there before the reformat is still there, hence the decreased capacity. How do I reformat this second drive (D:)? I have tried using the format command from a 98 bootdisk, and received the message "Format for this drive not supported." I would like both drives to be in the FAT32 format. When using fdisk to examine the contents of both disks, the C: was shown as normal. It was named drive 1. The other drive there (drive 2) showed only about a capacity of 2 gigs. How do I wipe everything from this second drive (D:) so that it is accessible when using XP? Thanks in advance.
 
Your post is a bit confused. You just want to wipe drive and create a fat32 partition to occupy the whole disk? (nothing to recover)

On that basis - it sounds like you may have created a fat16 partition (max size 2GB) on it - presumably either by fdisk (if run without large disk support) or if its a 'corrupted' partition - which may have happened when you tried to run format from 98 boot floppy.

Anyway, couple of points:-

1. Max size fat32 partition you can create with XP is 32GB - so you need another partitioning tool - like 98's fdisk (or ME's).

2. 98's fdisk may need a patch to cope with partitions > 64GB - see here:
If you boot from (patched) 98 boot floppy, run fdisk, using option 5 to change to second drive, and ensuring large disk suport IS enabled. You can remove any existing partitions, then create new fat32 one. Reboot to boot floppy again to format it. Hopefully all should be well now - boot back into XP, and should be a new drive for this partition.

PS. Why are you using fat32 - ntfs has much better recovery features in the event of a problem.
 
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