I got Maxtor 20GB formatted in NTFS from a friend. I installed it in Win98 SE machine as slave drive it's not recognized - Primary drive is in FAT32 format. Can someone shed a light how to have the drive recognized by the machine so I can reformat in in FAT32? Thank you very much in advance. Regards, mm

NTFS if the WinXP drive format, and will not be recognised by anything lower. I had similiar problem with Me and XP. If i remembver rightly i solved it by booting with startup disk and booting without cd rom so goes to dos mode. Then from dos running fdisk. If i remember rightly (again) i deleted the NTFS partition (extended DOS etc...) and then re-did that into FAT32. Basically you have to remove the NTFS part first coz i dont think anyting but NT and XP will recognise it. Is the drive not recongnised in fdisk? in dos promt type fdisk (after booting from startup disk). Can you see it there? I hope this helps, let me know please ROb

Yes, you have to wipe the NTFS partition(s) off the drive. Run fdisk and create Fat32 partition(s). If you run into a problem deleting the NTFS partition with fdisk, download DelPart. DelPart is a free utility that will remove stubborn partitions that fdisk can't delete. http://hercules.lss.ksu.edu/download/MSSTUFF/delpart.exe IMPORTANT!! Be very careful when you are using fdisk to select the correct drive or you will lose everything.

Rob is correct (mostly). Win98 will not recognize a drive (or partition) formatted as NTFS. NTFS partitions can be recognized by NT, Win2K, and XP. If you have Partition Magic, you can convert the partition to FAT32 with no data loss. If there's nothing on the drive that you care about, try deleting the partition with fdisk & then create a new primary DOS partition formatted as FAT32. There could be a problem though. Fdisk often has a problem recognizing & deleting NTFS partitions. If this is the case, use Delpart instead. Then use fdisk to create the new partition. You can get Delpart here: Delpart For a guide to using fdisk, thy here (from the "How-To's" on the left: ">FDISK Hope this helps. Dave

Oops...Bad link. Let's try that again: FDISK