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I have a xp machine that I want to fdisk an external usb portable hard drive.

It has no patition, I was told to d/l bootdisk.exe I did and made a bootdisk floppy. The machine booted, but does not log to my usb which would be E:

I want to create a partition on this external usb HD and then format it in Fat32.

What an I doing wrong?

All help will be appreciated.

TommyR

Hey there TommyR and welcome to PCHF,

Could you confirm something for me:

• Does your machine already have Windows XP installed?
• If the above is true then you can boot into windows and use "Disk Management" to partition and format the hard drive.
• You can find that under Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management

If your machine doesn't have XP loaded then I assume you are wanting to use this drive as the main boot drive?

The machine has Xp installed. The problem is with the external usb hard drive.

I made an Image backup of my C: drive and saved it on my external usb portable HD.

When I got the external HD it came partitioned with Fat32, I used xp to change that to NTFS.

When I went to use the Image software "explorer" to look inside the Image on my usb HD it said there was a problem with the file.

The software people told me to change it back to Fat32.

PROBLEM -- XP would not let me go back.

I then, in error, deleted the partition on the usb drive.

Now I can't even log over to it.

I d/l bootdisk.exe made a floppy, (win98se oem) as advised, someone said to do this cause xp will not let me go from NTFS to Fat32 (there is NO menu pick for that now).

If the floppy could have loaded a usb driver I guess i'd be able to log over to the external drive and do a partition and fomat it in Fat32.

How to do this I don't know.

TommyR

You should still be able to format the HD with winXP in fat32 , only you cant "convert" back to fat32 from NTFS. Thats not what you are doing/want to do , but maybe thats what they thought when they said you needed a bootdisk.

But that it doesn't show the option to "format" in FAT32 is not right..

Have you also tried formatting the drive while in diskmanagement? If no then try that , if yes then while in disk management delete the partition there and recreate it.

"...You should still be able to format the HD with winXP in fat32 , only you cant "convert" back to fat32 from NTFS. Thats not what you are doing/want to do , but maybe thats what they thought when they said you needed a bootdisk...."
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Yes -- that was my initial problem, XP would not let me go back to Fat32
There was NO menu pick for Fat32 ONLY NTFS.
So then, mistakenly, I deleted the partition.
Now I need to re-partition and format to Fat32

Remember this pertains ONLY to the usb external portable hard drive.
Can't format in xp disk management because the partition was deleted it does log to it or see it.

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But that it doesn't show the option to "format" in FAT32 is not right..

Have you also tried formatting the drive while in diskmanagement? If no then try that , if yes then while in disk management delete the partition there and recreate it. How? Right now it does not even see it.

Open up disk management, do you see your USB drive in there?

If you see it you should be able to right click on it and choose partition, you can then format it.

This site may help:
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...disk_mgmt.html

After I deleted the partition on the external usb HD -- disk mgr. does not even SEE it.