> Before you go that route, see if there's an easier way. It's fairly likely > that the drive is already formatted as a FAT filesystem. Also, I presume > that by "external drive" you mean a USB drive. I think these days it is more likely that it is formatted NTFS than FAT32. FAT32 doesn't support very large volume AFAIK. So I would suggest first finding out what it is currently formatted as. (You can do this under linux or windows, but probably easier under windows if it is NTFS as FC does not support this out the box. Under XP just plug it, right click on the icon and check out its properties). The other question is what do you want to do with this disk ? If you are going to use it 100% ONLY under linux, and reformatting it as ext3 is probably a good idea. If you wish to share it because OSes (linux, windows, MacOS) then you will need to use a format all support. ext3 : Native under linux, third party drivers exist for windows. Not native in Mac OS (never really understood why..) but again I believe third party packages exist ntfs : native in windows, read support stable for linux. read/write for linux available but rather new, so stability not so certain. I guess native in MacOS ? fat32 : generally works read/write everywhere, but unfortunately does really support the big drives these days. I recently went through this myself. Since I use linux most of the time, with very occasional win XP, I choose to use ext3. Chris
