Why can't I format my Firewire drive as Fat 32 1

[coopdeville]

For some reason XP Pro has stopped giving me the option of formating my new Lacie 200Gb Firewire drive as Fat 32, it's only giving me the option od NTFS which is no good to me as I need to use the disks on my Powerbook at home.
The weird thing is I was able to format my 120 Gb Ice Warrior drive no probs last week.

I'm far more familiar with Mac OS X and Win NT so I'm floundering a bit on XP pro.

Any help much appreciated!

CDV

 

[bcastner]

Large block addressing (a.k.a. FastFAT) provides 2^28 addressing or a limit of roughly 128 gigabytes for a FAT32 volume.

LBA uses a 28 bit binary number to specify the sector number on a drive. Thus:

228 = 268435455 Sectors

268435455 Sectors x 512 Bytes/Sector = 137438952960 Bytes

Resulting in the 128GB (137.4 billion Bytes) ATA-5 size limit.

The upcoming ATA-6 specification will provide a new (separate) 48-bit binary field, to specify the sector number on drives over 128GB.

So, XP will not format a drive larger in size than it can access. It then defaults to NTFS that can format the drive as a single volume.