Acmlm's Board - I2 Archive - Hardware/Software - NTFS + other drive issues
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HyperLamer
Posts: 895/8210 |
If the cable's upside-down, the access light will be on constantly, so I doubt that. Could be loose though. |
NightHawk
Posts: 147/621 |
Originally posted by neotransotaku
The limit of FAT32 is 32GB, so that is why your drive responds crap on FAT32 with 200GB.
Bah. FAT32 can be used on partitions as large as 2TB, it's just terribly inefficient for such large drives.
The 32GB FAT32 limitation is an artificial one, introduced in Win2k (although if you create a >32GB FAT32 partition with some 3rd-party tools, Win2k and WinXP will work with it just fine).
As for the floopy, if it can't read a disk, then
(1) the IDE cable is upside down
IDE cable? 
You mean the floppy cable, right?
Anyway, as others have said, format the drive as NTFS... much better for large partitions.
Oh, and you'd probably want to turn off indexing on the drive, since most people don't use the search feature often enough to make it worthwhile. |
neotransotaku
Posts: 679/4016 |
The limit of FAT32 is 32GB, so that is why your drive responds crap on FAT32 with 200GB. As for the floopy, if it can't read a disk, then
(1) the IDE cable is upside down (for HDs you can trust the tab--for floppy, tabs are as useless as a pinto)
(2) the boot order is not correct
(3) the drive is totally dead |
FreeDOS
Posts: 492/1657 |
FAT32 gets very ineffecient on new hard drives. It was made as an improvement to the 16-bit FAT, in order to lift its limitations. Although Microsoft didn't seem to have 200 GB partitions in mind. 
Use NTFS. Format it, as Ailure said. NTFS was designed so that all partitions equal to or greater than 512 MB have 4 KB clusters. (Even though NTFS supports up to 64 KB, there isn't usually good reason to override the default.) |
Ailure
Posts: 2144/11162 |
Yes NTFS will help in that situation. But only if you format it, converting it from FAT32 to NTFS dosen't make the cluster size smaller. At least that's what I heard.
And it's normal, my 80 GB harddrive is showing up as 74,53. And here is the reason why it is so, it's nothing to be worried about. 
The floppy. Have you checked if there is any loose cables in the computer? Or if the floppy is probably connected? If it's broken... well feel lucky that they are very cheap . I bought one once when it broke on my old computer...  |
theclaw
Posts: 74/202 |
I recently installed a 200GB hard drive using 100% of the space for a single FAT32 partition, and noticed something. Each cluster (or is it an allocation unit?) is 32KB! It seems like an inefficient use of disk space, since 8GB partitions only use 8KB for the smallest files. Would NTFS improve my performance in this situation?
The formatting process was difficult, since Fdisk doesn't work too well on such large drives. It's only set up for letter C. Why is the size showing up as 186GB? I'm confused by that. 100% of 200GB should be obvious. I used a Windows 98 CD to format it, but not for an OS.
Also: is there a program that can run tests to find out if my motherboard's floppy port went bad? It won't respond to anything connected. |
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