Member Avatar for mrumens

I have just bought a Maxtor 3200 usb external hard drive. It is formatted in ntfs. I have two operating systems Win98SE and XPHome. Both are formatted in fat32. I need to keep them both in fat32. However, I can't seem to format the hard drive in fat32 (doesn't give me the option). The hard drive is 160gb. Do I need to partition it to be able to format it in fat32. If so, how big should the partitions be?
Hope you can help
Marian Rumens

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Member Avatar for edouard89

I found some information here and here from the second link it looks like you have to use NTFS if the drive is larger than 137gb. So you may have to partition it accordingly. Hope this helps but I am not an expert on this.

Member Avatar for dcc

You should also change the FAT files to NTFS files. If you need help try this.

Member Avatar for realPING

HI, Had my 3200 for 7 months-- Flashing green light this am-- they told me its now a nice paperweight... Out of warranty, I called on a Tuesday, it was Morning, she was in India, I was irish catholic.. everything but how to help... Then the dim wit- sent me to data recovery dept. They want $700 to get my data back-- was just about to buy 12 of these... No more segate for our company and I am posting on all the tech BBS I subscribe to..

Al Clark
aclark@realping.com

Member Avatar for bobbyraw

I have just bought a Maxtor 3200 usb external hard drive. It is formatted in ntfs. I have two operating systems Win98SE and XPHome. Both are formatted in fat32. I need to keep them both in fat32. However, I can't seem to format the hard drive in fat32 (doesn't give me the option). The hard drive is 160gb. Do I need to partition it to be able to format it in fat32. If so, how big should the partitions be?
Hope you can help
Marian Rumens

Maxtor 3200, is this the size or the drive, is the rive made into the external enclosure. did you get a cd with the drive ( you can use this to format the drive to fat32) personally i would not because a drive over 137G will be easily damaged with fat file system

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