Computer help forum: external harddrive

Not exactly sure why you'd want to do this, given that NTFS has better security and is more efficient in its use of disk space, but...

Basic steps are to plug the drive in, let the found new hardware thing do its job, delete the NTFS partition off the drive, replace it with a new FAT partition, then format the partition as FAT32. If you need a little more to go on, then try the disk management tool found in the computer management control panel, buried in the administrative tools folder on the control panel. Shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the rest from there.

thanks for the replies.

i'm wanting fat32 on this driveso i can use this to store my divx files, to use on my phillips dvd player. it has a usb port for using thumb drives, and it'll also use an external harddrive formatted fat32.

maxblast was worthless. it recognized my 2 internal drives, but wouldn't let me select the usb. but i did install the software anyhow.

at that point, it didn't show up in My Computer, but did show up in device manager.

i went to control panel, admin tools, computer management, disk management. found it there. i initialized it, and went to format it,
but it'll only allow me to format in NTFS. so thats what i'm currently doing.

i'm hoping i can re-format it fat32 when this is done.

FAT32 USB hard disks are reported in our Storage forum about weekly with pleas about "help me get my files back." Fat32 is not good about damage resistance. Go ahead but don't count on it for "storage."

Bob