# How to format an external drive to FAT32



## brainwave89 (Aug 6, 2007)

I have a new Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive and wanted to know how can I format it to FAT32?

I want to hook it up to a computer whose hard drive crashed and I want to boot to Knoppix so I can attempt to retrieve any information possible to the external drive.

Thanks for looking.


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## Armiris (Sep 6, 2007)

You can use almost any OS to format a drive, just go to the drives settings or properties.


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## brainwave89 (Aug 6, 2007)

Thanks for your reply.

In Vista I only have NTFS as an option. I will try XP.


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## coderitr (Oct 12, 2003)

It depends on the size of the drive. FAT32 isn't supported on drives over 20GB (or something like that -- I can't remember the exact capacity limit.) You will have to break the drive up into partitions smaller than the limit then it should let you put FAT32 on it. I don't know if Vista will give you FAT32 as an option then.


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## crjdriver (Jan 2, 2001)

The limit is 32gig; above that and fat32 is not an option in disk management.
You can use a third party app like acronis disk director to format a drive of that size as fat32. There may be some free apps as well that will do the job for you.

BTW have you checked the drive? Many externals come pre-formatted as fat32.


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## brainwave89 (Aug 6, 2007)

Thanks for your help.

I think the best way around this is for me to use my 2GB Flash drive. It will take a few trips but will leave my new Seagate drive intact.

Cheers!


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## SB305 (Sep 20, 2007)

I've never had to use a drive bigger than 80GB, but the Win 98SE boot disk will happily fdisk a single 80GB partition on a drive mounted internally and then format it to FAT 32.


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