Quote Originally Posted by romanempyr
my external drive has 300 gigs of ntfs stuff and it has around 100 gigs free.
If you mean that you have 300 gigs in NTFS partition but another 100 gigs of unformatted space free, great, but I don't understand why you would leave 100 gigs of space unformatted on a hard drive. If you mean that you have a 300 gig drive and all of it is formatted but 100 gig is unused, then you are not going to be able to use that space for a FAT partition, unless you delete the NTFS partition or have some software that will resize it. Generally this is not the thing that you want to be doing at the same time that you are trying to recover files from a hard drive.

Linux's fdisk should let you make a FAT partition, but I haven't used it very much and can't talk you through it. Since it's an external hard drive I would personally plug it into another Windows system and make the FAT partition there, then put it on the Linux system. But you should be able to do it with Linux formatting tools if you need to; just read the documentation and do a little Googling until you are very comfortable that you will do it corectly.