I bought an external 3.5" harddrive case with Western Digital 80GB. I ask the shopkeeper format the new harddisk in FAT32 for me( but I not sure he heard my word or not).
After that, I test my new external harddisk(mounted with USB2) in home with machine that Win XP (SP 1 withe latest update) installed and I found that the file system of my external harddisk is NTFS. I right click the external drive icon and choose "Format" in order to reformat the harddisk in FAT32 but the File System's rolldown menu show only NTFS!!
What's the problem? I going to use this extenal harddrive in PC and Apple, please help.
Thanks.

I probably shouldn't be trying to help, as I'm asking for so much help myself and therefore don't really know what I'm doing, but what is the problem with using NTFS?

Again, I don't know enough about it.

If you really want to reformat the hard disk, you could try using Partition Magic to reformat it. It's pretty straighforward.

I don't beleive that WinXP will format a HD that large with fat32. The size limitation is 32GB. There are two work arounds to this. Either partition the drive to allowable sizes or format using a Win98 machine. For further info see this MS knowledge base article 314463:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314463

If you don't want to buy Partition Magic I think there are also freeware programs to do that. But sorry, I use Partition Magic myself and never regret the buy.

jea46f:
The problem is that old windows versions (and apple too I think) can't read NTFS partitions as it came new with win2k and XP!

OtheHill:
I have two FAT32 partitions of 71,1 and 39,5 GB on two of my drives and it works without problems with ME and XP.
I did them with Partition Magic and it never mentioned anything about size problems!

Free Weasel
That is because you did them with partition magic. I didn't say that WinXP couldn't mount a Fat32 drive larger than 32GB, just that it can't format it. According to MS knowledge base this is by design. MS want you to use NTFS on larger drives but allows XP to access Fat32 partitions created elsewhere. My advice gave two options, one of which was to format in Win98. I didn't mean to exclude any other method. I was simply explaining why this person couldn't format that drive while in WinXP, using the XP format utility.

If all else fails you could remove the drive from the case and temporarily install it in a win98 system. You will need the new fdisk to partition a drive over 64gb.