Mabye gparted or Windows ME Boot disk.

Indeed, many live Linux distributions include GParted, and that will do the job nicely.

For some reason I once had trouble installing XP to a large FAT32 partition, but you might not be concerned with booting.

http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb2.html says a downloadable update intended for Win98 (this one, I assume) includes a version of FDISK that will happily create large partitions.

Thanks, I'll give GParted a try and post back. Once I've tried it. Otherwise, I'll try and get hold of a Windows ME boot disk.

I do plan on booting from the drive, but with Windows98SE. I haven't had any issues doing that so far, but I do disable scandisk.

Update: I might be doing something wrong, But Windows 98 doesn't seem to be able to read drives formatted with FAT32 using GParted. It gave me an error about not being able to read the last cluster.

Up to 128 GiB, you can just use the Windows 98 SE boot disk / CD. It will report odd numbers, because it can internally only handle 64 GiB, but apart from that, everything will work fine and you will end up with a 128 GiB FAT 32 partition.

Now for drives that are larger than 128 GiB, I partition them on a modern PC, in a USB HDD docking station. I use: http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

Another option is using FreeDOS or Super FDISK, which is a bootable CD with graphical user interface.

So there are LOTS of options.

What capacity drives are you using? If you got Seagate drives, you can also limit the capacity with SeaTools. I often do this and turn them into 32, 60 or 120 GB drives for easier compatibility with old systems.

I've used the Win98SE boot floppy and installer CDROM to partition IDE drives up to 120GB for years. The trick is to use percentages instead of numbers. For example, on a 120GB drive, if I wanted a ~40GB primary partition, I would choose "33%" rather than "40000".

If I wanted to use the remaining space for logical partitions, I would select "100%" of the remaining space for the extended partition. I could then select "100%" if I wanted a single ~80GB logical partition. See where I'm going with this?

If I'm running XP, I use diskpart and a utility called fat32format to get the job done.

Hirens boot cd and you're ready to kool with 4 or 5 disc tools in ms-dos + some tools over mini windows xp

I use Ultimate Boot CD myself, works well

just ask my 1.5tb drive formated as FAT32 🤣

I'll bite. Why do you need a 1.5 TB drive formatted as FAT32? There are perfectly suitable NTFS drivers for DOS and Windows 98.

The whole reason the artificial 32 GB barrier is there in the first place is because performance suffers on large FAT32 partitions. Or at least, that's what they keep saying.

hiren's boot cd... for old PC builds I use version 9.5. In Partition tools section, there are good graphical tools to format and partition disks...
http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/hirensbootcd/
here is the official ftp with all releases

candle_86 wrote:

I use Ultimate Boot CD myself, works well

just ask my 1.5tb drive formated as FAT32 🤣

Thanks, I actually have UBCD, but I've only used it for the Fix HDC command for transferring Windows 7 installations.

Jorpho wrote:

I'll bite. Why do you need a 1.5 TB drive formatted as FAT32? There are perfectly suitable NTFS drivers for DOS and Windows 98.

The whole reason the artificial 32 GB barrier is there in the first place is because performance suffers on large FAT32 partitions. Or at least, that's what they keep saying.

because at times i plug it into linux and mac computers, it contains alot of stuff, and is a semi permanate, but is removeable easily make sense now?

And fat32 does suffer because of fragmentation at any size compared to ntfs, but i just have it defrag while im at work, it defrags monday-wednesday-friday.

candle_86 wrote:

because at times i plug it into linux and mac computers, it contains alot of stuff, and is a semi permanate, but is removeable easily make sense now?

Well, no, not really. Why not use NTFS? OS X and Linux have both supported NTFS for a while now. Or maybe exFAT?

it defrags monday-wednesday-friday.

I guess you're not concerned about shortening the life of the drive over the long term.

ibm5155 wrote:

Hirens boot cd and you're ready to kool with 4 or 5 disc tools in ms-dos + some tools over mini windows xp

This is ultimately what worked for me. Thanks. 😀

I ran mini XP and was able to run GUI Format from a USB flash drive.

Problem solved. 😀

Jorpho wrote:

Well, no, not really. Why not use NTFS? OS X and Linux have both supported NTFS for a while now. Or maybe exFAT? […]
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candle_86 wrote:

because at times i plug it into linux and mac computers, it contains alot of stuff, and is a semi permanate, but is removeable easily make sense now?

Well, no, not really. Why not use NTFS? OS X and Linux have both supported NTFS for a while now. Or maybe exFAT?

it defrags monday-wednesday-friday.

I guess you're not concerned about shortening the life of the drive over the long term.

defragging only shortens the life of a solid state drive, this is a traditional mechanical drive, and no because of how I use it, and the fact FAT32 can be read on anything build in the last 20 years almost I'll stick with it.

Btw, is there any Win98/DOS7 drivers for exFAT??

candle_86 wrote:

defragging only shortens the life of a solid state drive, this is a traditional mechanical drive

They don't run forever either. Whatever.

alexanrs wrote:

Btw, is there any Win98/DOS7 drivers for exFAT??

The first Google hit is http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/142437-exfat- … m-for-win-9xme/ , which suggests that Win98 really isn't built to access files larger than 4 GB. It also links to http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/mix_entry.php?id=7861 , which uses the HX DOS extender.