Cybes51

umm i think the name is pretty explanitory, but i bought a new external harddrive and it came preformatted with ntfs, but i would like to format it with fat32, i plugged it into my windows comp and right clicked the drive and format, and when i go to select the format type it only shows ntfs, any ideas, also i deleted the partition through the administrative tools, no go either.

thanks any help would be greatly appreciated

linderman

Hello:

First off; I would like to submit a general warning; Dont format your drive with the Fat32 file system if your drive is larger than 120 gigs. Its a disasterous ordeal.

Secondly: you will need to wipe and erase the drive to clear the drive of the NTFS file system. Any utilities such as Fdisk etc will not recognise the NTFS file system as such and will bug out.

You can use one of these two free utilities to clean & wipe your drive

darik's boot & nuke (floppy version is the easiest)
http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Kill disk
http://www.killdisk.com/

once you have completed the wiping process (its slow @ 40 minutes to wipe 20 gigs) then you will be able to partition and format the drive. I strongly suggest you do not use Win XP to format a Fat32 drive as; win xp disk managment has a capacity limit of 32 gigs for a Fat32 drive !! Microsoft
does have a policy to discourage the use of Fat32 and their policy is not without merit >> Fat32 is fast becoming extinct for good reasons.

You will need to either consider using a Win ME boot disk (free @ www.bootdisk.com) or Super Fdisk (also free) BOTH versions have the ability to format drives that are larger than 64 gigs and can make partitions larger than 32gigs (but drive size is limited to under 137gigs)

http://www.shareup.com/Super_Fdisk-download-18631.html

**** warning: you can not store files larger than 4gigs on a fat32 file system; i.e. dvd movies ??????

please dont hesitate to ask more quiestions if needed