Ability to install XP on FAT32?

[fredmsfn]

I've installed XP many times, and I am wondering why sometimes XP thinks I have to format my drive as NTFS, instead of being able to choose between that and FAT32. If I begin installing inside windows, I can use FAT32, but booting sometimes only gives NTFS.

any ideas, or anyone with the same problem?

[spazmire11]

i belive its xp's limitation with fat32 they sumhow made it support only 32gib fat32 drives i THINK thats how it is anyways

dont quote me on that tho

[Coco]

spazmire is basicly correct. Windows install only offer fat32 as an option is the partition is smaller then 32gigs. Bear in mind, that is partition, not drive. So you could use fat32 with even a 500GB drive.

fat32 has some serious issues now though, for example fat32 can not have files bigger then 4GB's and I've seen people have issues with that quite a bit recently and it's only going to get worse. Also a fat32 partition any bigger then 16GB causes it to use 32KB cluster size, which for most people means you'd lose many gigs of storage space if we did this with a 500Gig HD.

So in short, fat32 is only usable with small partitions and although you can set it up on bigger ones it's a really bad idea and you're just asking for problems.