Formatting an External 500gb drive?

[Technical Ben]

In fat32? Is it possible without pulling a small gas giant out of orbit?
I'm fixing a external HDD for the family. It seems to have lost the file structure, and my limited knowledge was not able to recover it. A photo/file signature recovery program will work, but for a few (cough) youtube videos it's not worth it. I will just format it instead.

However Win 7, and the powers that dictate universal law, will not format a drive lager than 32gb in FAT32. Obviously. So how do people do it? As linux, Xbox, PS3 and macs all have FAT32 and larger HDDs already. :/ 
Fat32 is not needed, I'd just rather replace it as I found it settings. Even if it was a dead drive to begin with.

[Rik]

I think you'd have to partition it, Ben.

[MisterW]

If you boot from a Live Ubuntu CD you ought to be able to use GParted to Partition and format the drive to FAT32.

Edit: or you could download a Live GParted CD from here http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
That's probably a bit smaller than a full Ubuntu Live CD.

[pctech]

Any reason why you can't use NTFS?

[Technical Ben]

No. So I'll just do that. Hope none of the Pcs have trouble accessing it.

[pctech]

Provided you are using Win NT/2000 up you should be ok.

[esh]

I would not trust FAT with 500GB of data, especially on an external drive. The possibility of lost and crosslinked files is just huge. FAT is an old menace of a file system which I am glad to be rid of.

Be aware than Windows 2003 onwards use a newer version of NTFS than Windows 2000 etc. This can cause weirdness if you format on a new version of Windows and move it to an old one, but it will most likely work. The curiosities that have popped up when you do this for me occur when trying to do a disk scan/fix and it reports gigantic numbers of corrupt indexes. Just a heads up.

[pctech]

Interesting,  I was not aware of that.

As you mention 2003 I take it you just mean the server version?

[esh]

I do.