just got a new hdd and have chucked it in my computer, windows xp said it had found it and i can see it in device manager, but not in my computer, i know i need to format it but how? can someone help please, as i gotta do this by 4:00 if possible...
thanks in advance Jim


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Go to Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Computer Man -> Disk Man and you can partn and format from their ... that's the (rather hidden) WinXP way!
It should let you select FAT32. If not you should find the FORMAT or OFORMAT command will natively use FAT32, if it isn't included with WinXP try using any Bootdisk, there's a website online if you need to download bootdisks 

Just to basically reiterate that in plain(ish) english. FAT32 is a big improvement over FAT16 (which was crappy at 1GB) but FAT32 is VERY wasteful on anything over 16GB (pretty wasteful over 8GB) and often problematic too on partns > 32GB. M$ want you to adopt their own NTFS so from Win2000 on it purposely makes things hard for FAT32 > 32GB. Unfort it is true that FAT32 doesn't cut it anymore but is very useful for those wanting to multi-boot to set up the first partn on the HD as FAT32 as almost every remotely modern (< 7 years old?) OS can use it. Guess that wasn't really much help LOL!