Windows XP doesn't let you format a partition with FAT32 if it is bigger than 32GB. This is obviously to force you to use NTFS. But if, like me, you want a big partition that can be read by many OSes including Windows, Linux and OSX then you have to use FAT32.

To do this, first you must create your partition, it is probably best to use windows disk management to do this.

Right click on My Computer and select Manage. Then select Disk Management from the left. Now find some unallocated space on one of your disks. Right click on the unallocated space and select New Partition.

Press next, select primary partition. Press next, enter the size of your new partition, the number that's in there by default is the ammount of unallocated space on your disk and thus the maximum size for the partition. Press next, select a drive letter of your choice (it can be changed later). Press next, select do not format this partition. Then press next and then finish.

Now you have a new partition that is not yet formatted.

To format the big partition with FAT32 you have to use Linux mkdosfs for Windows NT/2K/XP. There might be other ways, but this is what I used and it worked perfectly. You can download mkdosfs from here:


Download mkdosfs.zip and extract it.

mkdosfs.exe is a command line program so when you extract it put it somewhere easy to access like C:. Now, press start then run and type cmd. Now, assuming you put mkdosfs.exe on C: type C:\mkdosfs

That should give you instruction on how to use the program. If it doesn't then you haven't typed in the path of the program correctly.

To format a partition you must type this into cmd:

C:\mkdosfs -F 32 -n -v

Where is a name of your choice for your new partition and is the drive letter of the partition you want to format. *Don't get the drive letter wrong!*

Once you have typed that in and pressed enter, the program should give you some information about your new partition like this:

mkdosfs 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
Win32 port by Jens-Uwe Mager
\\.\ has 255 heads and 63 sectors per track,
logical sector size is 512,
using 0xf8 media descriptor, with 390716865 sectors;
file system has 2 32-bit FATs and 8 sectors per cluster.
FAT size is 380816 sectors, and provides 48744400 clusters.
Volume ID is 4149e22c, volume label .

It will be unresponsive while it formats the drive, but it only took about 30 seconds to format my 200GB partition.

Note the -F 32 part of the command. mkdosfs can format FAT12 and FAT16 partitions with the relevant command. If you don't include -F 32 then mkdosfs will use either FAT12 or FAT16 so make sure you do put that bit on.

So there you go, now you have a FAT32 partition bigger than 32GB that can be read and written to by many OSes and you didn't even have to leave Windows XP
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