Re: resizing old fat16 disk failing

From: Bill Rising (brising_at_louisville.edu)
Date: 01/11/05 

Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 08:51:42 -0500

In article <fac6u0pdbfmntab1nrd6tj76518t2umb3l@4ax.com>,
 Steve Jain <essjae-No@Spam-hotmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:31:21 -0500, Bill Rising
> <brising@louisville.edu> wrote:
>
[snip...]

> Ghost duplicates a disk image. If you're disk image is FAT16,
> Ghosting it to a FAT32 disk image does nothing. Ghost will overwrite
> whatever's on the existing drive (partitioning included).

According to the ghost documentation, using the -f32 flag when ghosting
(which I did) converts fat16 to fat32:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/1999010409444425

documentation: -f32 "Lets Symantec Ghost convert all FAT16 volumes to
FAT32 volumes when the destination partition to convert is larger than
256 MB in size. Ensure that the installed operating systems can access
the volumes that will be converted to support FAT32."

>
> FAT16 is limited to 2GB. If you want to increase your disk size, your
> best bet is to convert your existing disk image to NTFS or FAT32,

It would be nice if there were a tool in MS Win2000 to do the conversion
to FAT32, but, alas, there appears to be only a tool to convert to NTFS.
This opinion is supported by info found here:

http://www.petri.co.il/convert_fat16_to_fat32_in_windows_2000_xp_2003.htm

Unfortunately, I have a nagging suspicion that I'll need to use some
sort of DOS application at some point, which would mean I need FAT32.
So, once again, I'm SOL because of missing tools.

>then make a Ghost image of it, then duplicate it to a larger image.

I'm not sure that I need to make an image of it. Ghost will do disk to
disk copies w/o having the middle image being made.

> If it
> works correctly, Ghost will give you a message asking if you want to
> expand to the maximum partition size.
>
> If Ghost can't do this, you'll probably need a utility like Partition
> Magic that can expand existing partitions.

I sure hope I don't need yet another application. I'm once again being
underwhelmed by MS Windows...

Thanks for the tips,

Bill
Still open for some semi-simple solution.

Quantcast