Question : Problem: Formatting Maxtor External HD

I bought a Maxtor 3200 external HD. It works OK with my Windows XP system, recognized it, and so forth, and I can copy stuff to the external HD. But it came formatted as NTFS and I'd like to reformat it as FAT32, as some backup programs won't work with it and I'm thinking perhaps this is the problem.

Someone told me I could do that. But when I tried to reformat using My Computer /Manage/Disk Management/Format, I got a drop-down list that had only one choice: NTFS.

Does that mean this drive can't be formatted as FAT32?

Answer : Problem: Formatting Maxtor External HD

If you have nothing you want on the drive and it has a valid drive letter assigned to it from a command prompt try

format /fs:fat32