Re: How to format FAT32 in Windows XP?


"Bill in Co." <not_really_here@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23t%23lbyneIHA.3724@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
John John wrote:
Bill in Co. wrote:

Anna wrote:

PD43 wrote:

Nope. When you boot to DOS, it can't see an NTFS partition.


"Bill in Co." <not_really_here@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OYxCtykeIHA.536@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Except with third party tools.


Well, PD43 (& Bill), not exactly...

A DOS boot disk, e.g., a Win9x/Me "Startup Disk", will "see" NTFS
partitions
very well. At least for the most part. The *only* NTFS partitions it
will
not recognize are those logical drives created in an extended
partition.
Anna


Not on my system it doesn't.
Not unless I have NTFSDOS (or whatever) loaded. We must have different
systems. :-)

Besides which, AFAIK, it is impossible for DOS-based enviroment to see
NTFS
partitions *unless* some NTFS driver has been loaded for it on that
disk.
And it's not on a standard Win9x/DOS startup disk.

It's a "trick" question on the test, Bill ;-)

Use fdisk and you will see that DOS does "see" NTFS drives. Seeing the
drive doesn't mean that it can use the drive or even explore it, if you
try to use the CD command to the drive you won't be able to access it.
But DOS fdisk can see and even deleted NTFS drives... unless it gets
caught up in the logical drive loop, then it cannot delete the drive
without the use of other tools.

John

OK, I wasn't even thinking about fdisk! Well, big deal, fdisk is (just
a bit) limited in what it can actually do, to put it mildly. :-)

I think it's fair to say that the Win9x FDISK is incredibly crippled
compared with other FDISK utilities. ISTR a Linux (there's that word
again -Ed) distro that had an FDISK command that handled just about every
disk format going, most of which were unreadable by the operating system
itself.


.

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