Quote Originally Posted by Conchial
Riddle me this , can I format the drive using any OS ? I seem to recall from antiquity that certain media when formatted by windows would routinly fail in other systems , even as fat.
You can reformat it with Windows. You can also reformat it with Knoppix, but I've never done it that way and can't think of a good reason to, except see below.

One thing to be aware of is that XP will not let you format a large FAT partition. I think the size they limit FAT partitions is 32 gig (but I'm getting ancient and could remember that wrong. There is a rather restrictive limit though.) The solutions are to make multiple FAT partitions, make 1 fat partition and the rest NTFA, or, my choice, use an older version of Windows or a third party partition/format software and make a nice big FAT. XP will still be able to read it fine, it just refuses to create it.