USB Partitioning/Formatting utility?

D

DaveH

Thanks in advance.

I have a new usb hard drive. Windows XP's disk management will not allow me
to format. Is there possibly a freeware 3rd party utility available?

Dave H.
 
G

Gordon Darling

Thanks in advance.

I have a new usb hard drive. Windows XP's disk management will not allow
me to format. Is there possibly a freeware 3rd party utility available?

Dave H.

What size is the hard disk. Windows XP only allows 32GB FAT32 partitions.

"How can I format my USB drive as NTFS?

Go to Device Manager and set the policy of the USB Stick device to
"Optimize for Performance". The default is to optimize for Quick Removal,
which restricts you to the FAT filesystem.
If you do this, then you absolutely must go through the the annoying
removal dialog to unmount the filesystem before unplugging the drive. If
you don't, then you have a good chance of losing data."

Regards
Gordon
 
D

DaveH

Gordon Darling said:
What size is the hard disk. Windows XP only allows 32GB FAT32 partitions.

"How can I format my USB drive as NTFS?

Go to Device Manager and set the policy of the USB Stick device to
"Optimize for Performance". The default is to optimize for Quick Removal,
which restricts you to the FAT filesystem.
If you do this, then you absolutely must go through the the annoying
removal dialog to unmount the filesystem before unplugging the drive. If
you don't, then you have a good chance of losing data."

Regards
Gordon

Thanks for your efforts. The drive is a standard 200 gig ide drive in a usb
enclosure. XP's disk management grays out the partitioning function on this
drive. Changing to "Optimize for Performance" does not change this.

Again thanks,

Dave H.
 
H

Horst Peiffer

DaveH said:
Thanks in advance.

I have a new usb hard drive. Windows XP's disk management will not allow me
to format. Is there possibly a freeware 3rd party utility available?

Dave H.
Hi Dave,

this here

http://support.seagate.com/dweula

does wht you want, provided your BIOS and the chipset of the USB box
support ide disks >128 GB.

Hth!

Cheers,
Horst
 
G

Gordon Darling

Thanks for your efforts. The drive is a standard 200 gig ide drive in a usb
enclosure. XP's disk management grays out the partitioning function on this
drive. Changing to "Optimize for Performance" does not change this.

Again thanks,

Dave H.

This might seem like a stupid question but is the disk partioned? You
ain't gonna format the disk if it doesn't have a partition table.

Regards
Gordon
 
T

tbobz

Thanks in advance.

I have a new usb hard drive. Windows XP's disk management will not
allow me to format. Is there possibly a freeware 3rd party utility
available?

Dave H.
Dave-I seem to recall having to right click on the button that gives the
drive number and choose 'initialize'. After initialization the option to
format was no longer greyed out. Here is a link that might help.
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html
Yours-Tbobz
 

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