how do you partition a USB external hard drive in FAT16 ??

Question

how do you partition a USB hard drive in FAT16?? is there any free
utilities that do it without wiping out the data ? i want to use a
partition for ubuntu

Answer 1

If anything, you'll want to partition as FAT32. Ubuntu can read/write to FAT32. FAT16 will only allow you to have 2GB partitons.

If the drive is formatted as NTFS, there is no way to convert to FAT32 without wiping out all of the data.

Answer 2

I presume that the external disk is USB 2.0, not 1.1. If so, that should
be
fully supported under XP with SP-1, using the defualt SP-1 drivers. 120
Gig
is small enough that you do not need to do anything special in XP.

As for the 1Gig limit, have you experimented to see whether it is almost
exactly 1Gig, or just somewhere between 10Meg and 1Gig? I recall that the
old FAT16 file system may have had a 1Gig limit, but clearly you could not
be using FAT16, since it also had a partition size limit of about 2 Gig.
FAT32 has a 4Gig limit per file, NTFS has esentially no limit on file
size.
Unless you share this external drive with a PC running 98 or ME, I would
use
Have you tried using the COPY command, run from a command promt, instead
of
windows explorer? Be sure to use the /V option, meaning verify that the
file copied is the same as the original. For example: COPY C:\file.xxx
X:\
/V, where X:\ is the external drive (or whaever letter it happens to be on
your PC).