----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Hord" Subject: [OT] Hard drive repair > it's FAT32 formatted, and my XP machines only > want to format it as NTFS. Does anyone have > a favorite (free or brief trial) product which will > format the drive to FAT32 and modifiy the FAT > to exclude the bad sections of the drive? I'm > willing to lose quite a bit of storage space: it > has an 80GB drive and I only need about 35. If you break the drive up into 3 partitions, you can format it FAT32. There is something really odd I discovered recently. FAT32 partitions are allowed to be over a terabyte, and WinXP will but quite happy with large FAT32 partitions, provided someone else formatted them. (Although I've never actually used a FAT32 partition larger than 60G). But XP itself will not format a FAT32 partition larger than 32G. Not sure why the limitation, but XP has been perfectly happy (for me) with FAT32 partitions formatted by Disk Druid and Norton Ghost. For very large partitions it probably is a better plan to use NTFS, but on XP Home, you need a way to escape the NTFS security. But if you are using XP Pro, I'd suggest NTFS anyway. --McD -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist