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USB External Drive: Use FAT, FAT32, or NTFS formatting?

 
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Cougar
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Joined: 30 May 2006
Posts: 59
Location: The Promised Land
PostPosted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 5:17 pm    Post subject: USB External Drive: Use FAT, FAT32, or NTFS formatting? Reply with quote
I have a question for anyone. I have an 80 gig drive, wiped clean. It needs formatting now. It is a normal 3.5 IDE drive. I run Windows 2000, and I'm connecting it via an External USB enclosure in order to back up all my data so i can wipe the W2K machine and reinstall.

The question is: Should the 80Gig drive be formatted using NTFS which seems to work, or FAT, or FAT32 (both of which I get errors saying that my attempting partitiong is too large)? I want to be able to plug this drive into Windows 98 as well as Windows 2000 and XP. Any thoughts? Thanks.
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Cougar
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Joined: 30 May 2006
Posts: 59
Location: The Promised Land
PostPosted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 5:36 pm    Post subject: Re: USB External Drive: Use FAT, FAT32, or NTFS formatting? Reply with quote
Quote:
Cougar: I have a question for anyone. I have an 80 gig drive, wiped clean. It needs formatting now. It is a normal 3.5 IDE drive. I run Windows 2000, and I'm connecting it via an External USB enclosure in order to back up all my data so i can wipe the W2K machine and reinstall.

The question is: Should the 80Gig drive be formatted using NTFS which seems to work, or FAT, or FAT32 (both of which I get errors saying that my attempting partitiong is too large)? I want to be able to plug this drive into Windows 98 as well as Windows 2000 and XP. Any thoughts? Thanks.


I actually just found this link that seems to shed some like on the topic.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.7744.10

There seems to be a 32Gig size limit for FAT32 formatting in Windows XP, so im guessing Windows 2000 would be somewhat similar. But formatting NTFS allows for largest sizes but may not be able to communicate with Windows 98 machines. I'll have to test that. Any other opinions?
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