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Can a Hard Drive be formatted by USB, or...???

I need to format a 160GB notebook hard drive to put into a special USB enclosure that has the ability to transfer data from Flash memory to the drive. I don't have ready access to a desktop PC which I could use a normal IDE connection to format the drive. I have a number of USB 2.0 enclosures, but don't know how. This drive needs to be formatted in FAT32 so it can be read by MACs as well as PCs.

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PUNKY

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rindi

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gzembow

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Thanks to both of you for your fast posts. While my computers are PCs running XP, I have access to a MAC running OSX 10.4 - does that have the option of creating the partition correctly so the drive is readable to MACs and PCs? I don't have Acronis Disk Director, but do have Acronis True Image. Does that work as well? Or are there any freeware utilities that do the same thing? Is there any other options?

Are the steps to use USB to format the drive as simple as connecting the new blank drive and plugging it into a USB port and then use the Disk Management (Administrative) Tool to format it?

rindi

I don't think true image can partition and format a disk.

I don't know OSX enough to be sure, but I think you should be able to format a disk with fat32 with it. Maybe you need a 3rd party tool for it.

You could also try using bootit-ng to format the USB drive. It boots from CD or floppy, and the trial version has all functions enabled. When it asks if you want to install it say no (Press ESC), then select partition work and chek if the USB drive is seen. If not, go back to settings and enable USB2 mode, then return to partition work, and now select the USB drive and use create to create the partition and format it to fat32.

http://terabyteunlimited.com/

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Lee W, MVP

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gzembow

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I will try those options and post the results. But to simplify which format to use, which format do all the commercially available external drives sold by Maxtor, Western Digital, SimpleTech and the others use that can be accessed by MACs and PCs? FAT32?

rindi

They'd have to use fat32. NTFS can only be used by windows based on NT. Other OS's often only have reading support at the most (Linux can meanwhile also write to ntfs, but it isn't recommended for use). The only other filesystem that m$ can use is fat...

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