Verified answer

Right click my computer, select manage, then click on disk management. In the right pane you'll see all your drives, simply select the external drive, right click it and select format, then select fat32 for the file system.

My personal preference for all of my disc formatting is a linux program called QTParted, which is a Partition Magic clone. You can get multiple versions of Linux as a LiveCD now, which will run from your CD or DVD drive and doesn't have to be installed.

I currently use Knoppix Linux 4.0.2 (this is an older version, but I've had problems with version 5 not recognizing my mouse properly).

Simply put the LiveCD in the disc drive and restart the computer and it should boot to Knoppix (or whatever other version you got) instead of Windows (without making any changes to your hard drives anywhere).

If you're using Knoppix, then you would open up the applications menu (same place as the Windows Start Menu) and go to either System or Utilities (I forget which one) and you should see a link for QTParted. If you don't (they may have removed the link in newer versions but the program should still be there), run Konsole (a terminal program.... there should be an icon for it in the "Quick Launch" type area near the "Start Menu"), and inside Konsole simply type the command "qtparted" (without the quotes) and it should run it.

If QTParted sees your external hard drive, which it shouldn't have any trouble with, then it should allow you to format it. It will allow you to format it to any standard Windows or Linux file system, including Fat32.

And in response to the answer above me... NTFS is not necessarily the better file system. A lot of people prefer Fat32. For one thing, Fat32 performs faster than NTFS. Other than that, I think that WindowsXP and newer do, in fact, require that they be installed onto an NTFS partition, but they are also 100% capable of reading and writing Fat32 partitions. In fact, currently the best way to share files between Windows and Linux on a dual-boot system is to use a Fat32 partition because both operating systems can read and write Fat32. NTFS does seem to handle large partition sizes better, and Fat32 cannot handle any single file being larger than 2GB I think (or at least not in Windows). In the end, it's largely a matter of personal preference.

As this is on an external drive its very easy to do. Go into disk administration of XP and create 2 primary partitions on the drive, each must be set to how much you want for NTFS and FAT32, remembering to leave an unallocated area for the Mac Partition. Once the 2 partitions are created you will need to format them accordingly, and once done boot with the MAC OS Installer disk to configure the final partition or plug into the MAC to do this bit. Remember you could lose around 200gb on a 1TB drive so take this into account when creating the partitions.

NTFS is the better format..FAT 32 is older. Still used in some mobile phones. Windows needs NTFS cos it supports file stuff that FAT32 doesn't. I ended up converting my older 40g to NTFS and music files work fine when I copy via cardreader to 1g microXD for my nokia phone.

You can reformat it using some partition manager for example Disk Director.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/disk...