USB Hard Drive FAT32 Format

[JRS]

Why does XP home only offer NTFS when I try to format this drive. I have
managed to do it thru a DOS box but surely I should be able to do it from
XP?

Jon

 

[JRS]

Sorry, thought I had done it thru DOS box but it says disk is too big. It is
only 40Gb and worked fine as Fat32 under Win98SE

Jon

 

[Thomas Wendell]

XP cannot format FAT32 disks bigger than 32GB . It can use them, though

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[Bob Harris]

XP refuses to format any disk larger than 32Gig as FAT32. That is
Microsoft's way of suggesting that big disks might perform better as NTFS.
However, XP will happily use a pre-formated FAT32 disk bigger than 32Gig.
You just need to use a third-party program to do the formatting. it it were
an internal disk, you could use FDISK or GDISK. For a USB disk, you might
think about Partition Magic, or other partition changing program.