Storage Solutions FAT32 and NTFS on the same external?

[Radon]

Hello guys,

Posting here after a very very long time.

I bought a 320 GB Seagate SATA HDD with casing to serve as my backup external disk. I want 2 partitions, one 70GB of FAT32 and the rest to be NTFS. Is that possible? I initially formatted using the XP Partition wizard and made the bigger partition (around 230 GB ) as NTFS. And the remaining 70 is now showing as unallocated space. I want to make it a FAT32 part. But the thing is that while trying to format the 70 GB part, the FAT32 option is not even showing in the "File System" option. Only NTFS is available...

Isnt it possible to have a FAT32 and NTFS on the same external HDD?

 

[bottle]

yeah you can have both fat32 and ntfs but the max partition size is 32 gb if i'm not mistaken .. there are some 3rd party tools that claim to overcome this limit though

 

[Eazy]

I have had FAT32 and NTFS on an external 2.5" HDD.... I think you will have to make the first partition as FAT32 as this file system cannot address HDD area over 128GB. So when you made it the second partition it must have been in a region after the first large NTFS partition which placed the FAT32 partition beyond 128GB limit.

If you absolutely need the first partition to be NTFS then make a small first NTFS partition and then the second partition can be FAT32 - make sure that the total of the first NTFS and second FAT32 partitions does not exceed 128GB and then the third partition can be for the balance of the free HDD space. I am not 100% sure this will work.

When I had to format a partition as FAT32 I used the Win98SE startup floppy - you can get this from Bootdisk.Com

 

[Radon]

Thanx guys.

Worked it out. I dont neeed 70 GB of FAT32. I could also do with 32. So I reformatted it so that the first part is 32GB of FAT32 and the rest is gonna be NTFS.