Thanks for telling me about the XP Disk Manager. I used it to create two primary Fat32 partitions of 31 & 27 Gigs. The drive is seen by Device Manager as Maxtor 6Y060P0. The two partitions are seen in the Disk Manager and labelled "Healthy". I made one "Active", but don't know what that means. BUT they are not shown in "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer". The drive in question is in a HD drawer connected to a separate controller, Silicon Image SIL0680 Ultra-133 Medley ATA Raid controller". Two other hard drives, a 40G NTFS and a 60G Fat32, still work fine in that draw. Do I have to do something else to make these partitions useable? Thanks, Bob You can do all this with XP's disk mangement tool. (Right-click My Computer/Manage/Disk Management.). Your unformatted USB drive will be recognized (Just look for a new drive in the console, I forget the terminology) Form there, just right-click the drive and select the options you want. This procedure and the command line version are explained in XP Help and Support. Bob Lendrim wrote: >I want to FDisk a 60 Gig HD into two partitions, and format them as Fat32. I plan to do the Fdisk/format job in a drawer, as a slave in my P4 XP SP2 NTFS machine. Then I want to put the new drive in an external USB case and use it with a variety of machines, one is PII, one PIII. They are of limited drive capacity but I know will read 30Gigs. I'm hoping they will read the 60 Gig external USB drive as two 30 Gig drives. > >Does all this sound possible and what problems am I likely to have? >Can I Fdisk and format from XP command prompt or do I need a boot disk? >I've never made two partitions on a drive before. The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website, web based bulletinboard for questions and answers: Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com