OK, I'm at my wits end!

I have two disk drives, a 10g and an 80g. I originally had XP installed on the 10g and was using half of the 80g for Solaris and the other half for extra storage for XP. I wanted to be able to mount this extra storage from Solaris, but as it was formatted with NTFS I couldn't (got the boot disk to be read fine though, as I chose FAT 32 during installation) so I set about trying to format this NTFS disk to FAT 32. Win XP wouldn't give me the option to format to FAT 32 with a right click -> format on the drive, only NTFS, so I put the boot CD in and tried to format it with that - the day before it had given me the option to format FAT 32 with the older 10g drive, however it didn't, it only gave me NTFS. Partition Magic thinks the entire 80g disk is 'bad' (even though my Solaris partition is happy) so I can't use that! I ended up using Solaris 'format' to delete this partition, and I *thought* that I had chosen to format it FAT 32, but whilst it seemed to create a FAT 32 placeholder, no other boot disk or OS recognises it as anything but RAW data. I've since installed 98 onto my 10g in order to format the disk from windows, but it doesn't even recognise the partition!

I'm a bit stuck! Any ideas??

Thanks,

Liz

Hi, I have had trouble with these partition dillemas ay! My advice is to get a bootable linux Cd, and use its fdisk. You will fint invoking a t command in Linux fdisk will prompt you to change the filesystem flag for a given partition. a 0c (fat32 lba) or 0b (fat 32) would do the trick, using a bootdisk, I would assume then you would be able to format that other half of the 80GB.

As for Partition Magic, so much for "the standard in partitioning" ay? I mean, it doesnt even make peace with one of the best OS on the market. Power Quest, wake up!