I did'nt think I would have to ask this question but ,how can I reformat a 10gb ata hard drive back to fat32 from NTFS? I remember now that it is'nt as straight forward as running fdisk.I unplugged my SATA drive & loaded the startup floppy but it eventually says no drives detected.The startup disc is from (ME)correction<I mean't to write XP not millenium. but am certain it is the same as a 98 stup disc.Either the drive is stuffed or I'm doing something wrong. Any ideas? P.S. I dont have any hard drive software. i.e Partition magic etc.
Hmm.. As far as I'm aware, it's as simple as running FDISK and deleting the partition and creating a new partition before formatting it as FAT32. Your problem may be because of your SATA controller. It may require a driver to be loaded (press F6 at the Windows XP installation process) first for drives attached to it to be detected.
Now that I corrected the original Q from ME. to XP,I dont think it fixes anything anyway.I disconnected the SATA drive & left only the 10gb ata via an ATA cable.Even though I want to install 98 not se,I used a ME startup disk which I dont think causes any problems.(unless being created from an oem Gateway version would cause any dramas!).It loads up the st up prog but when I try to format it says no disks detected.I tried the XP disc to format but nothing as well. P.S. Again Im sure I read somewhere ages ago that reverting back to 9x after formatting adisk with ntfs was not as straight forward as it should be!
Err.. Wait a minute. When you used the Windows XP start up disc, did it ask you to press F6 to load third-party drivers? When you are prompted to do so, press F6 and insert the floppy disk containing the driver for your SATA controller. Otherwise, the operating system won't be able to detect and initialize the drive.
Hmm. I read it wrongly then. As far as I know, u cant convert NTFS back to FAT32 through windows. Anyways, why would u want to do that?
huh ? .. as far a i know you can convert from FAT32 to NTFS in Windows XP .. but not the otehr way round
Huh? You sure you can reverse the conversion? I always thought you can only convert FAT32 to NTFS but not the other way around?
To answer the last few posts: Adrian,I need to install 98 on the 10 gig ATA drive which has been formatted with ntfs,thus the need to reformat with fat32.I'm using the XP ntfs sata drive to post this. Psykhotik:Need fat32 aka Win98 to play some older games like Outcast (not jedi),where I cant ride the bloody twon-ha to travel the large maps apparently because of XP or maybe the faster timing in new chips. Chai:Care to share a bit more about using disc management & XP.If I were to use disc management to format I would need to have both drives plugged in.Have never used an ata,sata config so m guessing that bios changes may be needed too?
I know you can convert to NTFS from FAT using fs:ntfs at the command prompt not sure the otherway around though. Maybe try typing fs:fat32
Even though I have googled many times with the quote "converting ntfs to fat32" & always getting the answer vice-versa ,this time I was lucky enough to get a possible answer.A very short answer using partitions as an example,where I right click on the partition,select delete,then if under 32 gigs fat32 should be a format option.This should apply to drives as well as partitions,we'll see!
did u try it with partition magic ? i think i did tried to convert ntfs back to fat32 by using that software before. Maybe u can give that a shot .
You can just boot up using the Windows XP installation, delete the NTFS partition on the hard drive you want the FAT32 partition on, and build a new FAT32 partition. I don't think you can just convert an NTFS partition back to FAT32, although that's possible in reverse. You have to delete the partition and create a new FAT32 partition. That means data in the NTFS partition will be lost. So, back up any data you may have in that partition beforer you delete it and create a new FAT32 partition.
Yeah, Adrian is right. As far as I know, there is no way to convert an NTFS partition back to FAT32. But what Adrian just offered looks like the right thing to do. And...it's not that complicated after all. GOOD LUCK.
It is a radical way to do it but you can reformat a partition within Windows XP or 2000 from NTFS back to FAT32 by doing the following: Go to your Administrative Tools -> Computer Management applet. Go to the "Disk Management" tool. Find the partition you want to reformat as FAT32 and DELETE IT. Create a new partition of the same type (primary or extended) of the same size. When creating the partition, it will ask you what format you want for it - choose FAT32. That's it - you're done. No reboot needed. To do this in a non-destructive manner in native Windows you are out of luck. I would suggest getting your hands on a copy of Partition Magic & keep it available at all times in a DOS-bootable form. It has a facility for non-destructively converting the partition format from NTFS to FAT32. Good Luck
