My system - 1200mhz Athlon, 192, multi monitors on geforce 2 and tnt2, sb live se edition, primary ide: 20gb hdd, 10gb hdd; secondary ide: 40gb hdd, 10gb hdd, all on fat32 filesystems running xp pro.

My problem - this is a strange one - I just formatted my new 40 gig hdd to the fat32 filesystem with the correct primary dos partition. I've done this numerous times before for Win 98, and it always worked fine, although for some strange reason my 40 gig is causing problems in xp - as soon as I attempt to copy files (or a minute or so after copying) to the new drive, xp will either blue screen, or reset the computer without warning. The files that did actually copy before reset remain on the new hard drive, and the system is stable as long as I don't write to it. Could this be because the hard drive was partitioned incorrectly? I don't think so, my other 10 gigs were formatted using windows 98 and they work fine with xp, although they were present when I initially upgraded from 98 to xp.

Any suggestions, hints, solutions? I'm out of ideas, so any offers would be greatly appreciated =) Just as a side note, I only have about 250 megs worth of space left on my c drive, could this be affecting the stability of xp when copying to the 40 gig?

- Tristan.

Fat 32 partition can't be over 32GB-----PERIOD. If you insist on this 40GB drive to be one partition, it must be NTFS format. NTFS is not limited to any size, but Fat32 is. Split the 40GB HD into two Fat32 partitions, or format NTFS. Running NTFS and Fat32 partitions together will cause NO problems at all!

Fat32 supports up to 2 Terrabytes. It is only under windows2000 and presumably XP that the fat32 falls on it's face over 32GB.

My opinion is that Microsoft did that for a reason. They want everyone to use NTFS. There are advantages to NTFS, but not enough to warrant what they did to reduce the handling of FAT32.

NTFS it is then! I'll try reformatting it to that file system - hopefully it won't have any problems with my other fat32 hdd's.

Remember that Fat32 and NTFS don't read each other-period. The Operating System reads/writes to NTFS-Fat16-Fat32 and doesn't care which format any device is written. The only device that I've found that MUST be written to in Fat16 is the Castlewood ORB drive. If the Orb is written in NTFS is has to be a fixed drive and is no longer a removable drive.

Thanks for the help, but I figured out the source of the problem!

It's my soundblaster live. After repartitioning, then reinstalling xp to the new hd, trying different pci slots and settings, the reset problem only occurs when the SB card is present - it doesn't matter which pci slot it's in either. Take the soundcard out, and the system remains stable no matter how much I dump on the new hd.

I find it extremely odd that my soundcard should be the cause of a problem that only arises when copying files to and from a 40 gig hard drive... but I also have an onboard soundcard in place, disabled in the hardware profiles... could this combination be causing problems on the motherboard?