Re: 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 16:03:37 -0400

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:31:13 -0400, Brian Meadows <brian@meadows.pair.com>
wrote:

Sorry for the omission - that's Windows XP HE. Hardly use it myself, I forgot
about the two versions.

>
>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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