Thinkpads Forum

I have a Thinkpad 600E, 2645-3AU, w/upgraded 400mhz PII, 544MB RAM, and two 40gb hard drives, running XP Pro SP2. I am in need of W98 in order to format an external hard drive with a FAT32 partition greater than 32GB. I understand that I can get install Windows 98 from the Recovery CD for my machine. My questions are how can I get this CD, and what exactly happens when I use it? If it wipes out everything on my HD I'm going to need to clone my primary drive before I use the Recovery CD. TIA

You don't need a recovery disc to do this. Send me a private message and I'll email you a program that makes a bootable flopy for Win98 with CDrom support (broadband access would be nice on your end...it is about 1.3MB size). Take your current HDD out of the 600E and replace it with the new one...then bootup with the floppy you've made. Once you boot with it, you'll be at an "A" prompt. Just type Fdisk and then you can delete whatever partition is there, and create a new, active one for the entire drive in FAT32.

The above is for getting a FAT32 partition on your drive...you need to make it internal first, then you can take it out and it will be external. No need to even touch your current drive, so no fear of losing your data. The CD will format and destroy your data before installing Windows98, but if the partition is NTSF, then it won't be able to budge. The only way to kill this type of partition is to use Fdisk or some other utility.

If you are wanting to clone your drive and that is the objective, then PM me anyway and I can help you out. My son owns a 600E and I've done that with his Thinkpad several times.

Are you suggesting put the external drive in my ThinkPad? I can't do that, this is a 3.5" drive.

It is even easier than that, Windows XP should offer you the OPTION of formatting in FAT-32 if you ask it. No special tricks required, the format disk utility has options

If not, then we can do all sorts of fun things for you but I believe Win-xp can format a disk in fat-32. Will check when I'm at home (Can't do it now) and re-reply this evening if you wish.

aau wrote:Are you suggesting put the external drive in my ThinkPad? I can't do that, this is a 3.5" drive.

Ah....you didn't tell me that in your original post. I was assuming "external" as in 2.5 inch...same as what's in your bay or Thinkpad, internally.

The problem is formatting the drive from your Thinkpad...don't know if it's possible. How are you going to use the external drive? Believe that the XP CD mentioned above will only deal with what's at the "C drive" level, but I could be mistaken and there could be some tricks I'm not sure about.

If you're hooking up the drive to your Thinkpad, via an enclosure and you click on the drive in "My Computer," does anything show up? If so, you can right click and there are options for formatting. Even here, there should be a FAT32 option....just a thought, but I'm still having trouble picturing exactly what your set-up is.

The 3.5" drive is a 250GB drive, and I can format it as NTFS from the Disk Administrator but not FAT32, because it won't allow it for any partition over 32GB in size. This is by design. Windows 2000 won't do it either. The only way I know of to format a large partition as FAT32 is from Win98 or ME. I would never use FAT32 otherwise, but I just need to be able to share the data(read/write) on this drive between a PC and a Mac.

Sounds like you just need a bootable Win98 floppy. Does your system have a floppy drive attached? If so, then do a google search for win98 bootable floppy and you'll find tons, or as I posted earlier, I can send you a file to set one up. You can use one of these to get into Fdisk to partition and format in FAT32.

I don't think you can do what you want to do with your TP600E and
Win9x boot disk, because as far as I know, USB is not supported
by DOS Prompt.

I think the easiest way to format your 250GB HDD with fat32 is to
use another PC having Win9x/Me installed. Or I think MacOS X may
have a fdisk/format tool which can create a fat32 drive, because it is
essencially FreeBSD.

If you have no choice but to use your TP600E loaded with WinXP, One
way I think would be possible is to download Knoppix CD, boot Knoppix
on it, make it recognize the USB HDD and format it using linux tools.

If you load Win98 to your TP600E using a recovery CD, I believe
everything will be gone. So you will need to backup everything.

One more thing, I'm not a TP600E user but I think the distribution
of Win98 recoverty CD is over long time ago. So the only channel
I can think of to obtain the recovery CD is through eBay, but there
may be other ways.

I have a floppy drive. Does the 98 boot floppy support USB and firewire drives?

No it doesn't...I also think that the post above me is correct. You would have to get DOS to recognize a USB or external drive somehow and that is very difficult on a 600 series thinkpad. Do you know about koppix...do you have broadband? If so, you can download and burn a copy of Koppix to CD and boot with that...it is a form of Linux that is the entire OS on a CD rom....a very useful tool. it will let you see any drive connected to your computer and is flexible enough to deal with formatting your USB drive. You can download it here: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Well I found a solution, I can format my drive from the Mac in MS-DOS format, which turns out to be FAT32, and there doesn't seem to a limit to the partition size. This must be something new in OS X 10.3, since I couldn't do this before. I now have a 250GB FAT32 that is read/write from both XP and Mac. Rather ironic that turning to a Mac would provide a workaround to the XP format FAT32 limit.