How to Partition/Format an External USB Harddrive

[Ben Nguyen]

I have an external 200G Hitachi hard drive in a usb enclosure,
and I would like to format externally without opening up my system and plugging
it in directly (since my Bios wont support it anyways).

Im running WinXpSp1 and I used Disk "Manager", and it sees the (unallocated)
drive (albeit only 186G of it), but does not allow me to partition or format
it.

Is there ANY way to do this? Is there a company that sells a boot disk that
will load usb drivers and format it?

Thanks!
Ben

p.s. The enclosure supposedly supports 250G+ hard drives, so any ideas on
the other issue of only 186G showing up?

 

[Rod Speed]

I have an external 200G Hitachi hard drive in a usb enclosure,
and I would like to format externally without opening up my system
and plugging it in directly (since my Bios wont support it anyways).

Im running WinXpSp1 and I used Disk "Manager",
and it sees the (unallocated) drive (albeit only 186G
of it), but does not allow me to partition or format it.

Have you got 48bit LBA support ?
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013

Is there ANY way to do this? Is there a company that
sells a boot disk that will load usb drivers and format it?

Should have come with the enclosure.

p.s. The enclosure supposedly supports 250G+ hard drives,
so any ideas on the other issue of only 186G showing up?

Thats just the difference between the decimal GBs that the
hard drive manufacturers all use and the 186GB when the
same size is specified in terms of binary GBs, 2^30 bytes.