Fortunately, I was just quoting the Maxtor FAQ, rather than speaking from
experience.

Microsoft designed FAT32 for HD's greater than 512MB. They also designed the
sector size to be 4096 bytes when using FAT32.  However, I know there are
several workarounds for both of those design limitations.

If you had ONLY a 450MB hard drive in your system, I'm not sure you could force
it to use FAT32, because I don't think FDISK would give you the option.  But
when it is an additional drive in a system that already has a drive larger than
512MB, FDISK does give you the option of enabling FAT32. Consequently, if you
repartition a small drive after you have enabled FAT32, it should (and
obviously, in your case is) be a FAT32 drive. And it sounds like that holds true
for small partitions on a large drive in general.  (Note: the above only applies
to systems using Win95B or later. FAT32 is not an option for Win95A or earlier.)

Roxanne Pierce
R2 Systems, San Diego
mailto:[log in to unmask]


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark C. Barron Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 1998 07:17
> > A FAT 32 partition can only be created if the partition size
> > is greater than 512 megabytes.
>
> I'm curious about this one, since I have a FAT32 (OSR2)
> partition that it only 450 megabytes in size.