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formatting external hard disk

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4 replies

by andre.van.der.beken

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I bought a Mobile Office Keyplug external hd, supposed to have a capacity of 40 GB. But when I formatted it, I get only 2 GB!

4 replies

by maz1980

It seems that the file system is FAT16 so that its maximum size is 2 GB. You must use NTFS or FAT32 (I suggest the later for portability) to get whole capacity. It seems that you must delete old FAT16 partition then recreate new partition.

by alldtoys

Are you trying to format it from Dos or from Windows? I have formated lots of drives, internal & external on a Win2k machine as FAT32 and so far I really haven't had a problem. I have a 60 gb (NOT FAT16). The easiest way to format the drive is from within Win2k. Right click on My Computer & choose MANAGE from the menu. Once the new window is up, choose disk management. Then find your external drive in the list & then right click on it & choose FORMAT from the menu. You will have the choice of formatting it as either FAT32 or NTFS. I rarely choose NTFS as I work in a network of mixed OS & NTFS can be a bother to access from across the network.
Good Luck, hoppe this helps.

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