I´m running Win XP pro on an unparted 60 Gb FAT32 Harddrive. Now, I need to format the entire disk and reinstall windows because my little brother "accidently" deleted half of the system files... Anyways, I´ve heard that you can´t format a FAT32 partion that is larger than 32Gb. If so how do I solve that problem. Can I creat another partion, and then format them both? Or i s it possible to format the hole thing with the WinXP CD? Happy of all help :)

You have to boot from the windows XP cd to format the drive. You may have to go into the bios to set your CDROM as a boot drive. When you format it you will have a couple more options . Since your drive is FAT 32 you can either format with FAT 32 or format with NTFS. I reccomend NTFS in my personal opinion but then you can not install a FAT32 based OS like 98SE or ME and have a dual boot setup You will not have any problems with haveing a large drive on FAT32, they had problems a while back that they fixed where the drive would only recognize 2 GB of whatever size drive it was. if you have other Q's just post em up!! POWER USER

on a clean install, you DO NOT have the option to format your drive FAT32 if it is larger than 32GB, when you boot from the XP CD. if you want FAT32 you will either need to partition under 32GB or use another boot disk to format using FAT32. this is not a supported environment for this OS, however. so if you have problems and call MS, they will tell you to reformat using NTFS on a 60GB drive. trust me, i've talked to them about it.

just d/l a 9x boot disk from bootdisk.com & use fdisk to partition to 32 gigs Then install xp

partition magic 7.0 will partition & format the drive in about 10 seconds (all 60 gig) then just install xp without making changes to the drive(at the partition format screen)

I would also use a Win98 bootdisk to strip the partition from your drive and start over. I'd also recommend making 2 partitions with FDISK. A 15-20MB partition should be enough for your OS, applications and games, and the rest of your drive would be taken up by the second partition. This way the next time a demonic sibling screws up your operating system you'll be able to format the OS partition, reinstall Windows, and not lose a byte of important stuff from the second partition.