If the drive has not been formatted already, you will now be prompted to format it. Go to My Computer and the new drive should now appear.In general, we recommend to create one primary partition and format the hard drive using the NTFS file system. Follow the Partition Wizard and set up the drive according to your requirements.Once done, right-click on the Unallocated space for further commands and select New Partition. Choose the drive you want to prepare and right-click on the gray field on the left side in order to initialize the drive.Right-click on My Computer and select Manage.The alternative is to go to Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management. You can find it by right-clicking on My Computer, choosing Manage and then selecting Disk Management. The tool used to format or reformat the hard drive on Windows XP and Vista is the so called Disk Management application. Win XP Format a drive on Windows XP & Vista
Your external hard drive is now ready to use! Note: The FAT32 file system can be used on most Operating Systems including Win98SE, WinME, Win2000, WinXP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Linux Systems but the maximum size of a single file is limited to 4GB.
Choose FAT32 and full format, enter a name for it and format the drive.
The new drive should now appear and after double-clicking on the drive icon, you will be prompted to format it. Restart your computer and then go to My Computer.After you have created the partition according to your requirement, close the MS-DOS command prompt by typing exit. Enter 1 to create a primary DOS partition and follow the on-screen instructions.In this example it is disk 2 but that may be different in your case! Select the drive you want to format but make sure to select the correct one.Enter 5 to change the current disk drive and press Enter.Select Y to enable the large disk support and press Enter.The first window will be the blank MS-DOS command prompt.You can start it by going to Start/Program Files/Accessories and selecting "MS-DOS" or you can go to Run and type "fdisk" instead. The tool used to format or reformat the drive on Windows 98 is the so called DOS command prompt and "fdisk". Win 98SE/ME Format a drive on Windows 98SE & Windows ME