Windows xp fat32 partition size limit

Do you want to format a drive to FAT32? FAT was introduced way back in and is compatible with virtually all operating systems. Thus, many users would like to format drive to FAT However, sometimes you might find there is no FAT32 file system in the format option. Why this problem appeared? It is usually due to that your partition is larger than 32GB.

If they format the drive in Windows, the system will not display the FAT32 option. FAT32 is one of the oldest of the three file systems available to Windows. The FAT32 contains four bytes per cluster inside the file allocation table. It is known as the most updated file system from Microsoft for Windows OS. This system is compatible with flash drives, thumb drives, or memory cards. The full form of exFAT is an extended file allocation table. It has large limits on file and partition sizes.

It optimizes exFAT for flash drives. NTFS is a modern-day file system that is used by default used by Windows. This file system has the file size and partition size limits, which are so huge that you are not likely to run up with disk space. It supports file permissions for security, a change in a journal that allows you to recover when your computer crashes, reach disk quota limits, shadow copies of your backup, etc.

You can use the following 2 ways to work around this issue. Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. After that, it will go back to the main interface. MiniTool Partition Wizard is a professional disk management tool. Here is the guide:. Right-click the partition you want to format to FAT32 and choose Format from the menu. Then, click OK button. But please note that this feature is not free. Well, there are quite a few third-party utilities out there to help you convert NTFS drives to FAT32 without losing data, but they are not free!

While there are some free utilities available, they support small USB drives only. If you are familiar with Diskpart command lines, you can choose to format external hard drive or flash drive via Diskpart tool. Skip to: content search login. Knowledge Base Toggle local menu Menus About the team. Knowledge Base Search. Log in. Options Help Chat with a consultant. Include archived documents. This content has been archived , and is no longer maintained by Indiana University.

Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable. A computer running Windows NT 4. Computers running Linux with later versions of the 2. Then tried installing XP with Service Pack 2 and it works fine. Let's see - XP was the successor to Windows Pro. Must have carried over to the first edition of XP. As XP progressed the limit must have been removed. Original edition seems limited.

SP2 is not. SP1 maybe??? I too had faced with the same situation, my ntfs files had an unlimited size and so it was really a great problem to saved it in Windows XP OS. Than I got to know about spilitting of files. But before making any thing I get a backup of all my files. Maybe there can arise a situation of los of files. In that case also you can go with data recovery xp tool andf have the data back.

The break of ntfs files can be done and than you can put it in your system. I just bum in here and see this interesting topic The original partition was only something like 68GB even though the drive is GB. I did some research and earlier versions of Windows including XP SP1 were limited to 68GB partitions because backup could not handle more. Thought the problem might be that I had two drives on same IDE channel so I removed second drive and tried again but same result.

Tried Acronis Home version free but got message that I had to buy the real version. In the end I gave up. Just created an extended partition and a logical drive for the remaining space. I see here that BIOS could be a limiting factor I upgraded the BIOS several years ago to the last one that Dell came out with for the motherboard so nothing more to do ther.

OK i finally tried to put more than 2tb, after burning all my stuff gb : well now on, I have a gb for C: D: swap and E , I have a gb hd for F: and 1tb for G: so I tried to install another hd of 1tb, all is running great for now, I try to full them all by copying over and over and did not failed whats so ever I just bought a Western Digital 1tb hdd.