My current setup is dual booting XP and Mandrake 10 off of one HD, and then a 120gig NTFS drive for archival. Seeing as how Linux can't write to NTFS, I want to convert the 120 gigger into FAT32, so it can be an archive drive for BOTH OS's. Reasonable?

I've heard that FAT32 can't support HD's bigger than 32gigs, or you have to start making partitions. I really don't want 4 partitions. Is there any way to get around that?

Thanks as always guys.

The maximum volume size for FAT32 is 2TB, but XP can't create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB. It can use partitions larger than 32GB, such as those created with a Win98 bootdisk etc. Consider creating a FAT32 partition and formatting it with a Win98 bootdisk, which can apparently handle volume sizes this large.

HTH
Baldrick

I looked into this a bit a few months ago...

FAT32 isn't limited to 32GB. From what I read, it just doesn't work too good past that. It doesn't scale-up well.

Windows won't make a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB. Call it a "feature". Or, another way for MS to collect more money from you... If you want a large hard-drive in Windows, you have to switch to the NT line so you can use NTFS.

If you do make a larger FAT32 partition, Windows shouldn't have any trouble using it.

I didn't go past this point, so I don't know if Linux will create a larger FAT32 partition.

try downloading

captive

full read/write access to NTFS partitions

Or just upgrade to kernel 2.6.3. That has full read/write access to NTFS partitions and is apparently quite stable.

Baldrick