The maximum volume size supported by FAT16 is 4 GB, so that's a lot of partitions you will have to create!!!!
FAT32 would be a better bet. You can use Disk Manager to format the disk up to 32GB FAT32 volumes in Win2K or WinXP. That's still a lot of volumes (and a large block size).
Interestingly, Win98 supports formatting much larger FAT32 volumes - up to 127.5GB - while the theoretical maximum FAT32 size is far larger (up to 8 terabytes with 32KB clusters, but as the boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, this limits the volume size to 2 TB on a hard disk with 512 byte sectors).
To create and format larger volumes you can use a 3rd party tool (
e.g. this) (or MAC OSX), or indeed the command-line
Format.exe utility in any Windows > 98.
However, Mac OS X doesn't manage FAT32 volumes of more than 137GB
AFAIK, but you could presumably make 3 x 106GB partitions. Also MS does not recommend FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB (for "efficiency") and does not recommend larger than 127.5GB (apparently not tested). But of course Win2K / XP can use large FAT32 volumes - MS just doesn't want you to, as it wants the world to use NTFS.
I'm sure that a MAC expert can provide more up-to-date information about MAC FAT32 / NTFS support.
If Mac OSX can now reliably write to NTFS partitions, that's probably the way to go.
SD