how to reformat NTFS drive to FAT32

My wife's pc has WinME. Also a FAT32 formatted hard drive. I want to
re-format a NTFS formatted external USB hard drive to FAT32, and need
instruction on how to do that.

I know that WinME can't read and write to NTFS, so want to reformat the
external USB drive to FAT32.

How do I do it?

Use FDISK, delete the partition and recreate which will then be FAT32
after which you can format it.

Attach the external drive to the Win Me PC.
Open a DOS window/Command prompt
Type FDISK and when asked click Y to enable large disk support (this is
for FAT32, otherwise you will end up with FAT16 and a maximum partition
size of 2GB).
Then using the Display Partition Information option and the change disk
option ensure that FDISK is looking at the external usb drive rather than
the hard drive in the PC.
Once you know that you are looking at the usb drive rather than the PC's
internal disk use Fdisk's "Delete partition or logical DOS drive" to
remove the NTFS partitions(s) and then "Create DOS partition or Logical
DOS drive" to create a FAT32 partition.

Once you have create the FAT32 partition the drive should be visible in
Windows Explorer and you can format it, either from a DOS prompt or via
Windows Explorer.
--
Mike Maltby



rb wrote:

My wife's pc has WinME. Also a FAT32 formatted hard drive. I want to
re-format a NTFS formatted external USB hard drive to FAT32, and need
instruction on how to do that.

I know that WinME can't read and write to NTFS, so want to reformat
the external USB drive to FAT32.

How do I do it?

Thank you. Concise, clear directions. I'm an old geezer and computer
doofus, and even I understand them.

rb wrote:
Thank you. Concise, clear directions. I'm an old geezer and computer
doofus, and even I understand them.


Keep in mind all files on the USB drive will be gone after
formatting etc. If you are just trying to access files on this drive you
better back them up to another media first.

rb wrote:

Thank you. Concise, clear directions. I'm an old geezer and
computer doofus, and even I understand them.

Thanks. I hope it goes well. My problem when making my post is that the
test system on which I checked the FDISK commands only has the one disk
and I can't remember the actual text of the change disk command so you
will have to work that out for yourself. Sorry. I think your PC's hard
disk will be identified as disk 1 and the external drive as disk 2
(assuming the PC has just the one drive). Which drive is being accessed
by FDISK is listed, by number, at the top of the page.

If you have problems please post back with full details and I will fire up
Win Me box and plug in an external drive.
--
Mike Maltby