Format to FAT32?

[Jordan L.]

Does anyone know of a simple way to fully format my harddrive to FAT32. I recently had a disk to do so, but I've lost the disc and do not have the ISO anymore. My laptop is in serious crap at the moment, no operating system's work on it because of when I installed Mac OS X on it. I forgot to format it back to FAT32 afterwards and now everyitnhg is stuffed.

Any help?

[Gaijin]

Wait I don't quite understand you, why would you want to format your HDD to FAT32??
What do you have on the laptop now, a OS or simply nothing?

[Jordan L.]

I have Windows 7 on at the moment, but it's buggy as hell. I installed Mac OS X onto my laptop, then took it off. When you install Mac OS X, it doesn't something weird to the harddrive so you always have to format it back to FAT32 for anything to work. (I've tried many times, always has to be FAT32.

[Gaijin]

So you have windows installed, that's good....
You DO have a CD-Drive, right?

You can either try this tool;
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard...rmat.shtml

Or you boot a CMD from a Win cd and do the format command, but that only works with 32GB or less HDD's, I think...

[Jordan L.]

I was looking for something a little more, "Boot and Format" type. I can't actually format the drive while running windows, because it needs to unmount the drive to format but can't if I'm using it.

[DAMINK™]

I still dont understand why you would want fat32.
But back in the day i used to use the xp disk and at boot i would run fdisk.
Been a long time though as its just not needed anymore i thought.
I think the new linux live disks only do NTFS but they may do fat32. I know 2008 and before they did anyway.
I reinstalled my 7 machine today actually.
Full format and repartition. No problems obviously. So it does confuse me a little.
And additionally i noticed in another thread you said you could not format a partition unless it was going to install on that partition.
Thats not the case either. I made and formatted my partitions today from the 7 disk.

[Gaijin]

I was looking for something a little more, "Boot and Format" type. I can't actually format the drive while running windows, because it needs to unmount the drive to format but can't if I'm using it.

Well you need to boot from the WIN CD and then choose, Repair options.. I can't really remember what it's called... maybe Repair, maybe System restore.. idk...
But you will get a DOS prompt, then you can run format C: /q /FS:FAT32 /q is for quick....

[Jordan L.]

I still dont understand why you would want fat32.
But back in the day i used to use the xp disk and at boot i would run fdisk.
Been a long time though as its just not needed anymore i thought.
I think the new linux live disks only do NTFS but they may do fat32. I know 2008 and before they did anyway.
I reinstalled my 7 machine today actually.
Full format and repartition. No problems obviously. So it does confuse me a little.
And additionally i noticed in another thread you said you could not format a partition unless it was going to install on that partition.
Thats not the case either. I made and formatted my partitions today from the 7 disk.

No no no, booting linux normally would be fine. And it usually is. BUT, I recently installed OS X which completely screws up your harrddrive so NOTHING else can install on there. I found the way to fix it, wihch is formatting the drive to FAT32 before you format it to NTFS / ext whatever. I lost my Mac installation disc though, and I don't know how else to format the drive to FAT32. Maybe burning a Windows XP disc might work?

[DAMINK™]

If you have an iso image of an older linux disk you could use that also?
I know the earlier ones could format to fat32. Im sure of it.
Really depends what you have lying around.
I would love to know what mac does to it during install though. It sounds like something worth watching out for.
However i would have thought if all partitions are deleted and then recreated perhaps of different size and then formatted it was largely clean?

[Jordan L.]

If you have an iso image of an older linux disk you could use that also?
I know the earlier ones could format to fat32. Im sure of it.
Really depends what you have lying around.
I would love to know what mac does to it during install though. It sounds like something worth watching out for.
However i would have thought if all partitions are deleted and then recreated perhaps of different size and then formatted it was largely clean?

I'm not sure what Mac does during installation. But I suppose because it's a hackintosh, intel based OS X. Just doesn't work. And thanks MoTU, but sadly it didn't work. At first I thought it would, because it started to format it, but then after like an hour and a half, it said "The Drive is too big to Format to FAT32".

*edit*
And no, most of the Old Linux CD's I have are corrupt. Besides, it can't even boot linux at the moment.