Formatting 74Gb drive for FC11 on Win7 machine?!
 

I have a nice, HPxw6400 dual/dual core workstation which is currently running Win7-64 from the IDE drive. I'd like to use one of two 74Gb SATA drives (drive G:) to run FC11, but the Win7 'format' command went to 100% before telling me that the disk was too big.
Now, that disk has scrambled formatting, and is currently useless.

Is there some free/shareware utility I can run that will allow FAT32 on such a large drive?
Do I even need this? Can FC11 be placed on an NTFS partition?

Also, does FC11 include nVidia drivers, or will I have to download the current versions from nVidia?

Thanx!
AndyGravity

You can format using the FC11 cd.. It includes a utility to format your disk to another file format (ie. EXT3/4 of JFS).

So don't worry about that :).

Don't use NTFS or FAT32. Use a native Linux filesystem, and let Fedora partition and format the drive during installation.
A non-native filesystem won't support the attributes that Linux uses, such as the owner, group & permissions. When mounting a FAT32 or NTFS filesystem, the permissions of files are determined by mount options which effect all files en-mass.

Check the sticky on the top of the Fedora forum on this site for instructions on adding the Fusion repo. A good site for locating rpm packages is rpm.pbone.net.

ok...I'm a bit confused. There is currently an IDE 250Gb drive and two 74Gb SATA drives.
The IDE is formatted NTFS as one huge partition and is currently dedicated to Win7-64.
Both of the SATA drives are NTFS, or were until Windoze 'format' cmd shat all over it. The other SATA is NTFS and will run WinXP if booted...right now, it's a data drive.

Should I use the Win7 disk to reformat the big drive as a couple of smaller partitions:
C: NTFS at 30Gb for Win7
D: Fat32 at 30Gb for Linux

Then let Grub work out the rest?

There's a difference between "partitioning" and "formatting" a drive. Partitioning divides a drives up into different partitions, while formatting puts a file system onto a partition. Your Linux install disk has the ability to do both of these tasks -- you need not do them in Windows. As jschiwal said, you should use a native Linux filesystem such as ext3 for your Linux install.

Thanx, I know the dif between formatting and partitioning. Unfortunately, Win7 seems to have some issues with that difference. I HAVE to run Windoze to stay in sync with my job. So the goal is a dual boot Win7 AND FC11, 64 bit. All the advice I've seen sez to install Windoze first, then Linux.

Windoze has twice formatted the 250Gb drive as one big NTFS partition, despite my attempt to do the "Custom" install and create separate partitions. Windoze will not make FAT32 partitions larger than 32Gb. Any ideas on how to do this?

The goal is a 250Gb drive, with 30Gb partition for Windows, a 30Gb partition for Linux and a 3rd partition for data accessible to both OSs. There are also two SATA 74Gb drives. One of which has NTFS, and a bootable WinXP setup. The other 74Gb drive was NTFS, and hammered by my Windoze attempt to format it as FAT32, which failed, scrambling the drive.

Any help is appreciated.

Since formatting the FAT32 partition on the second hard disk failed, and there isn't anything on it, you can add a fat32 partition while installing Fedora. A FAT32 partition would allow you to save files there that both OSes can read. But FAT32 isn't suitable for running Linux for the reasons I already stated. Linux can also read and save files on an NTFS partition. You can't repair a bad NTFS filesystem however. ( An ntfsfix program will fix some simple errors and then marks it as bad so that Windows will check it when you boot up into windows. )