How do I format and partition my new external hard disk?

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Nice lesson leo , thanks for your creativity in articles and explanations.
http://www.fosdir.com

Try booting with (horrors) the 98SE Emergency Startup Disk and use (gulp) FDISK.

I realize that DOS is beneath contempt, but it has its uses, even now.

NTFS is not all it's cranked up to be. FAT32 works very well and any Microsoft OS can read FAT32, except maybe 3.1.

Slave drives using FAT32 are transportable between or among other Microsoft PCs with, in my experience, no problems.

I didn't know about this RSS search. You answer all the "BASIC" questions I have been wanting to get answered all the time.
AMAZING. Many times I simply BROWSE actually FINDING questions and then feel "hey! I always wanted to know that. I cant believe I still don't know that after being computer-literate for 12 years."

Thanks.
Your Fan,
Gurvin.

Thanks a lot.I have tried the above method but delete partition menu is grayed out.I logged in as administrator.Can you suggest any other solution?
Thanks again for simple yet informative article.

Dear Sir,

I have never seen such a good piece of step-by-step instructions. Being a non IT person I found your above article "to the point and precise". Excellent methodology employed here. Paticularly what I liked most was there was no ambiguity whatsoever and where ever possible, the instructions are backed by logical reasoning. Thanks a million. Keep the goo work going.

my hard is new i hink it isn't pre-partitioned so removable disk space didn't apper in the list of the drivers.what's your advice??
thanks in advance.

Must echo Ajit's comments above. Nice to see this sort of thing explained so well and with such clear english. When I put XP Pro onto a new HDD the other day, it prompted me to create a partition, and I did that, only to now find that most of the hard disk is listed as Unallocated, and I am so far unable to do anything about it. If I try to follow the "wizard" in Disk Manager, it seems to work but then keeps coming up with an error. Must be some way around this....I am sparing you the lengthy details, of course, but hope to use your article to sort out the problem. Thanks again!

I have two new Vista Home premiun systems, a Win98SE system, a Win 95 system, and a 3.11 system. I will keep the question simple and expand it later as needed.

Can all of these systems access and read/write an external hard disk through a network. I have a D-Link 825-Dir dual band router with WiFi and gigabit cable (4 ports)capabilities?

I would expect to make a separate partition on that external hard disk for each of the systems backups. Is all of this reasonable?

I bought a hard drive (500g) and a HD enclosure. How do i format this drive from scratch. It shows as Maxtor Grizzle in Device Manager, but does not register when i do manage/ my computer. Only internal drives show.??

Hey! I followed all of the above steps for my LaCie 500G external desktop drive and I continually have the same problem...after being connected for a while, it disconnects and a message appears: usb device not recognized...every single time...it's turning me nuts...Initially I had not formatted so I threw everything out and formatted it as stated here...no luck..after 5 hours of formatting the thing still disconnects...very frustrating...please help

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