Re: Fat32 not an option from Admin Tools - Disk Management?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: Norm (nospam_at_BAM.com)
Date: 12/07/04 

Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 17:49:50 GMT

You could just yank the drive and install it as a slave in your pc, boot
from a dos disk and format.

"hupjack" <hupjack_nospamtoday_yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:quednYsCj7qN3yjcRVn-iA@comcast.com...
So I've got a nice big HD in an external USB2.0/Firewire Combo Case, and I
want to use it with BOTH my Mac and PC. The Mac is running the latest
10.3.x, and the PC is totally windows updated (XP SP2 + hotfixes).

To the best of my knowledge, the only format that will work cross platform
without any additional software is FAT32. Having plugged the drive into my
PC, I was shocked to see in Admin Tools - Disk Management, only one option
in the partition / format wizard. NTFS or NTFS!

Knowing full well that Microsoft hadn't eliminated support for FAT32, I
opened a command window and typed format /? and sure enough, right there was
FS: (file system switch)

So what's the deal! MS decided they wanted to make it difficult to format
drives in something other than NTFS? The Admin Tools is NOT the place to be
hiding options from power users! What is this big brother garbage?

OR.. (and this could be my bad here).... am I wrong and FAT32 normally is
an available option in the GUI? I mean during XP install from the Bootable
XP disk you get the choice of FAT32 or NTFS. Is Fat32 no longer an option
once you've made your system disk NTFS? Is FAT32 not an option because my
drive is on USB and not directly sitting on the IDE ribbon? Is the 120GB
drive too big for FAT32, and the Admin Tool knew something that the command
window didn't?

Thanks in advance,
Ethan 

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