Making FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB's
 

Hello all - this is my first post here, (sorry if this is a stupid question thats been asked 100 times, in the wrong forum)

I've only just installed Xandros the other day, and it's my first experience using Linux (so I'm pretty much as n00b as you can get). The way I've got it all set up (or I'm hoping to have) is my 80GB hard drive is partitioned into three different drives.
The C drive is 35GB, and has windows installed on it,
The D drive is also 35 GB, and thats where I've installed Xandros to,
The E drive is only a GB or so, and is my swap drive for linux, (which a friend told me I needed - I'm still learning why this is so)

I've also bought a 200GB drive reciently. My hopes were to format it to FAT32 so that no matter what OS I'm using, I'll still be able to access all my mp3's, video files, and games which I'll store on it, but I'm not sure how to make it larger than 32GB's. I've been told that it is possible to make it larger, but I don't know how.

Can someone offer advice or forward me onto a user friendly program that'll do this for me?

Appriciated!

Erm...

Make partition... Type. Format?
This is a real odd question, I've had 3 computers with Fat32 paritions about 32gb... what's the big deal? The laptop I use now had 37.4 (40gb) till I erased it for linux... Or did the computer manufacturers just do something special to make it work...

Yah, I've tried that, but when I've tried to format it the entire thing to FAT32 it'll only make it 32GB's large, as opposed to being 180ishGB's large.
I'm not sure how I can do this though (seems a waste to have a HD with a 200GB capasity to be limited to being 32GB's)

If you have or can get a Win98 bootdisk, the fdisk and format on there will create a FAT32 partition up to 128GB, so I've heard.

Either way, you'll have to partition the drive a bit if you want to use it as FAT32.

I shouldn't have too much trouble finding a boot disk - thankyou.

Did anyone else have advice about the best thing I could do with my 200GB hard-drive so that both my OS's can read and write from it?
I'm still weighing up my options..

If you have access to a windows machine, you can use a utility called Acronis Partition Expert. Here's the link: http://www.acronis.com/products/ I used it to create a 120gb FAT32 drive that I could transport between a windows machine and our linux file server. Hope that helps.

Travis