93GB Maxtor fat32 fails reduce size for too many clusters

Hi!

I think the problem is not the size of the FAT32 partition (there is no size limit for FAT32 as low as 93 GByte), but the way it is managed.

Windows ME relies on what the BIOS reports about your hard drive. If the BIOS sees only 32 or 64 GByte, WinME can't access more - unless you use a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO - the "driver" you are using). This is a little piece of software which resides in your hard drive's MBR and in the following few sectors, and which "re-programs" the BIOS and IDE controller with some fake hard drive geometry that will give you access to the whole hard drive capacity.
GParted runs under Linux - and since Linux does not rely on what the BIOS tells it, but performs a thourough hardware detection during each boot-up, it does not use this "fake" drive geometry, but instead the real geometry reported by the drive. It is thus able to access the whole drive, even if the BIOS sees only a part of it - the downside of this is that Linux very probably uses a different drive geometry than reportd by the DDO software.
As a result, the file system on your WinME partition might be reported as damaged (or even be unreadable) from within GParted - but in reality, this file system is perferctly OK, and the "error" is induced by the different disk geometries!

I think the most reliable way is to back up all your data, wipe out the MBR (or create a new msdos disklabel from within GParted), install WinME again (this time not using any DDO software - your WinME partition will be limited to what the BIOS sees of your hard drive! You must not assign the entire BIOS-visible hard drive space to WinME, since you also must install a certain part of your Linux system inside this area - so you'd better save around 200 MBytes for this purpose). Then you have to install Linux - thereby, tell the installer that you want to manually partition your hard drive. First, create a partition which is located completely within the BIOS-visible area - if you saved 200 MByte, you should use around 150...170 MByte for this partitition (just to be sure). Mount point for this partition is /boot; this is where your boot loader, kernel and initrd (which are the only parts of the whole Linux system that must be accessible using the BIOS routines) are stored. The remainder of your drive can then be divided into a root and a swap partition as you wish.

The other - more dangerous - variant would be to try to "repair" the WinME partitoon using the GParted "check" function. Once this is performed, you should be able to resize the partition to make space for your Linux install. Keep in mind what I said about drive geometries above - you might completrely and irreversibly destroy yll data stored opn this partition, so back up all your data before doing anything!