Using the XP Installation CD to Format Drives

As technology has improved, hard drives have become larger as the prices have dropped. I remember the days when 200MB was considered huge and DoubleSpace made you think you had unlimited storage, but that's another story. Back during that same time period there wasn't any NTFS file system. It was FAT and FAT16 which eventually evolved into FAT32 and become the drive system of choice for most home installations. That too has changed as more and more home users are seeing the benefits of NTFS. However, NTFS does have one significant limitation in Windows XP. XP cannot create or format a FAT32 partition greater than 32GB in size.

Since hard drives with a capacity greater than 32GB are common these days, this requires a shift in thinking from the conventional ways of formatting and preparing them for use by an XP computer system utilizing the FAT32 file system. If you are using NTFS this is of no consequence since XP will format a >32GB drive with no problem. Conventional wisdom holds that the way to format for FAT32 is to use a boot disk from Win98 or WinMe, but you can do it with the standard XP installation CD just as easily. The procedure is as follows:

Boot the computer with the XP CD in the drive and allow setup to begin. When you come to the screen where you select the drive partition you should see the drive listed with all the space listed as unpartitioned. If the drive was in use previously, you'll need to delete all the existing partitions. To do this you'll have to hit the 'D' key followed by the 'L' key. The screen instructions will be visible to guide the process.

Once all the existing partitions are deleted the display will show the total unpartitioned disk space.

Hit the 'C' key to create a partition. If you only want one partition then hit enter and the entire disk space will be allocated to the C Drive, but it will be NTFS, assuming the drive is 32GB or larger. However, if you want to create several FAT32 partitions then do not hit the Enter key. Instead, hit 'Backspace' until the cursor moves to the first digit. Enter the size of the first partition to be created.

Repeat the create partition process as many times as you want till all available space is allocated to partitions.

Once all the partitions have been created, use the 'Up' arrow key to select the C drive partition to install XP on and select to format it with FAT32 if you are sure that NTFS isn't a viable file system in your situation.

After XP has been installed and is running, navigate to Disk Management and format the other partitions with either FAT32 or NTFS. This step is necessary before the partitions will be available for use.

Since this is a clean install and the drive has to be formatted, it only makes sense to use the tools that are available in XP without having to bother with a floppy diskette.