Hard drive format compatibility - what am I missing?

From: Brian Meadows (brian_at_meadows.pair.com)
Date: 10/27/04 

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:31:13 -0400

I'm trying to help out someone with setting up a backup procedure.

There are two PCs to be backed up, a laptop running Windows Me (it's not capable
of running 2000 or XP) and a desktop running Windows XP SP2.

The backup device is an 80 GB external USB drive, and the aim is to get both
backups on to the one external drive.

I was under the impression that formatting the whole drive as one humongous
FAT32 partition would work, that Windows XP would read and write either NTFS or
FAT32. Seems it isn't that simple. :-(

I created a primary partition on the external drive using the laptop (Win Me),
let it take the whole 80 GB, formatted it and backed up the laptop. Everything
OK so far.

I then switched the external drive to the XP desktop, and found I couldn't see
the drive. Fired up the disk administrator, and Windows XP thought the drive was
all unallocated space.

I then tried creating a smaller FAT32 partition, 20 GB to be exact, formatted
that on the laptop and backed it up again without a problem. Switched the
external drive to the XP machine, expecting to be able to create another
partition to hold the XP backup. Nope. I looked at the drive in the disk
administrator, once again it saw the whole 80GB as unallocated space.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? I was under the impression that XP
could handle both NTFS and FAT32 partitions. Is there some kind of size limit
for the FAT32 partition? Does it all need to be formatted on the XP box?

Thanks for any assistance,

Brian.

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