Ok, so I have a Photo bank type External Hard Drive called a 'Digimate II'.
It's a bit old in the technology race and it takes like 15-25 minutes to transfer 1GB of data. That kinda blows compared to current devices which can do it in a few minutes apparently.
Well, I was experimenting with using it also as an OS building testbed as I'm really trying to make a better build of my Tablet WinXP OS which is heavily laden down with OEM Crapware that I can not find.... More on that in other threads at other times.
What I ended up doing was splitting my 40GB drive into a 17GB and a 20GB partition, thinking that I could set up a handful of programs installed directly to one of the drives for helping people with computer troubles.
Problem is, to my knowledge, no photo bank type HD case has the ability to view NTFS.
This isn't a real problem when dealing with drives smaller than 32GB, and I was able to turn my primary partition into a Fat32 drive and retain my Photo bank capability. But only for less than 32GB of my drive. This turned my drive into a bit of a mess.
Later on, I redid those numbers wanting a 3.5GB NTFS partition for WinXP and a 33.8GB partition in FAT32 for other purposes.
This too didn't work out as I had hoped. Primarily because of the way the Photo bank works, searching first for the HD to use in the first sectors on the drive, rather than skipping over them to the part that it can actually recognize.
But it also didn't work because I had a 33.8GB partition which was 1.8GB over the limit for WinXP to format in FAT32.
PITA time!
After quite a number of Google searches, and a handful of downloads, reboots, boots to DOS, Boots to Win98, hard drive swaps and a few hours of general fiddling around to no good end, I discovered an app that is beautiful in it's simplicity and is totally free!!!!
It's called Fat32Format and it rocks.
After a 2 second download and a 2 second unzip, I double checked that I had the correct drive and fired off a 'fat32format h:'. 1.97445 seconds later, my 33.8GB hard drive was formatted perfectly.
Apparently, after more than 15000 downloads, he has only experienced problems with a single drive of the type Lacie 300GB and apparently it is a troublesome device in general, so it looks like the app itself is solid.
I hope you benefit from this link. Although in the end, I didn't get what I want from my drive, it was refreshing to find a program that worked so simply and efficiently that did exactly what I wanted without any mucking about.
This will have application to anyone who is dealing with formatting drives for use with external enclosures with Card readers built in pretty much exclusively. |
