USB Hard Drive

[reg]

I have just got a 160GB USB hard drive that works great on my XP home computer, but I formated it to NTFS that is only reconised by XP.
I have also got a ME computer but this will not reconise the hard drive as it needs to be FAT32.
Now this is not the end of the world for me but is there an easy way to change it back to FAT32, and if so can you make it as easy to follow as possible.
Are there any advantages to it being NTFS formated?
Thanks for any help, Reg

[Alan]

Get a utility to create a W98 boot floppy from here and put it in your WIN ME machine and boot to that. Use the version of FDISK and FORMAT on the floppy to partition and
format the drive.
Due to the fact, that FAT32 is not intended for very big hard drives,
but NTFS is, the format utility in XP has the built-in rule,
not to format big disc partitions in FAT32 but only in NTFS.
(I think everything more than 32GB goes NTFS or so)
NTFS is usually better suited, so this might make sense in general.
There is no such limitation in Win98 fdisk and format utility (since it does not talk NTFS).
So such a boot disk will help you around.

The other option is to use Partition Magic to convert to FAT32.

[Wolfeymole]

Originally Posted by reg

I have just got a 160GB USB hard drive that works great on my XP home computer, but I formated it to NTFS that is only reconised by XP.
I have also got a ME computer but this will not reconise the hard drive as it needs to be FAT32.
Now this is not the end of the world for me but is there an easy way to change it back to FAT32, and if so can you make it as easy to follow as possible.
Are there any advantages to it being NTFS formated?
Thanks for any help, Reg

For all the formatting in the world you will achieve zero unless your bios supports booting from USB, which I doubt it will on an ME supportive pc.
Systems running before 2000 excluding NT run on a DOS platform.
I have run XP on a 266mhz cpu and 256mg of ram before today but it was as slow as a snail.
If you have a better spec then go for XP and format it in FAT32, NTFS is better though.