Reformatting drive (WinXP Home)

[Cwazee Yeti]

Hi all,

I have an old portable external HDD that I use to swap between my main
PC (WinXP Home SP2) and my old WinME notebook. This external HDD is
FAT32 and has a lot of junk on it. I wanted to reformat the drive
(staying with FAT32) but when I went to Computer Management -> Storage
-> Disk Management, and right-click the above-mentioned drive and
select Format, the File System dropdown list only lists NTFS.

I recall about a week ago that that dropdown had FAT16, FAT32, and
NTFS. What happened to my two FATxx options? I haven't made any changes
on my PC since the last time I actually saw those two options.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tom Porterfield]

Hi all,

I have an old portable external HDD that I use to swap between my main
PC (WinXP Home SP2) and my old WinME notebook. This external HDD is
FAT32 and has a lot of junk on it. I wanted to reformat the drive
(staying with FAT32) but when I went to Computer Management -> Storage
-> Disk Management, and right-click the above-mentioned drive and
select Format, the File System dropdown list only lists NTFS.

I recall about a week ago that that dropdown had FAT16, FAT32, and
NTFS. What happened to my two FATxx options? I haven't made any changes
on my PC since the last time I actually saw those two options.

What size is the drive? XP is only capable of formatting a FAT32 volume up
to 32 GB.

 

[Cwazee Yeti]

You're right, Tom...

It's as 80GB drive. The drive I mentioned where I saw all three file
systems was a 20GB.

Thanks!