how to partition 500 gb portable harddrive to fat32 is there any utility?

If the drive is already NTFS then there are a few utilities that MIGHT work for you. They also might trash the entire drive. Why do you want to convert to FAT32? FAT32 on a 500GB drive is very inefficient.

There's a lot of slack space with large HDD formatted as FAT32. If I'm not mistaken, the default cluster size would be 32KB. The default cluster size for NTFS is 4KB. What that means is if you have a file that's only 2KB in size, it will occupy 4KB of space with NTFS, but it will occupy 32KB of space with FAT32. In other words, you'll waste a lot of space with FAT32 on a drive that size.

Othehill and Jam are correct about the wasted space in FAT32, but there are some situations where FAT might be desired. With the humongous drives available these days, wasted disk space is not the big deal that it once was. How to format an external drive as Fat32: http://www.online-tech-tips.com/com...

Back when I switched from win98 to XP Home I chose to stay with fat32 as at the time I had never dealt with ntfs. I am a if it aint broke don't fix it kind of guy. recently I started hitting that 4GB file size limit a lot so I went ahead and switched then. I didn't use any utility I just backed up and reformatted both disks. It was time for it anyway. Now I don't know why I held out switching to ntfs. I have to ask what is the reason fat32 is wanted? When would there be advantages? Likely Practice makes perfect but only if you practice perfectly!

I don't think there is any advantage that FAT32 has over NTFS. Personally, I use Fat32 for my OS drives, because I feel more comfortable troubleshooting in FAT32/DOS. But my other drives are all NTFS.

Fat is Faster by most users. It doesn't have security features of ntfs. You can't just convert by any program. You have to use ntbackup or other solution to save data off and then format it using the correct command line switch. Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)