Hello, Ron!

Thanks for all the tips/info below. The WinME pc didn't seem to have a way
to initialize the external drive. It was "detected" as a USB memory
device on the System Tray, but I couldn't find a way to configure it in
Device Manager. What am I missing? Meanwhile, I plugged it into a spare XP
Home pc. I was able to partition and configure the drive using the XP pc.
However, there didn't seem to be a way to specify FAT32. The only option
was NTFS. ((( Where did I go wrong in all this?


You wrote on Fri, 30 Jun 2006 20:11:16 GMT:

RM In order to use standard disk utilities such as Scandisk and Defrag on
RM the drive you will need to split it into 2 partitions of approximately
RM 125 gb each.

RM With FAT32 these partitions will have a 32k cluster size which will be
RM fine if you are storing large files on the drives as the slack space
RM (average at least 16K per file) will not be a major consideration.
RM However if you were using them for large numbers of small files then
RM this could add up to a significant amount of disk space in total.

RM Also with FAT32 you will have a a maximum file size of 4 gb and some
RM applications will only create 2 gb files maximum. This may affect
RM your storage of disk images, for example.

RM You may want to consider using NTFS on at least one of the partitions
RM as that will allow files larger than 4 gb, even though the NTFS
RM partition would only be accessible from Windows XP.