Formatting an External Disk for NTFS

You would think setting up an external disk for a Windows machine would be a simple matter of just plugging it in and away you go. And it should be like that.

In order to make the manufacturers' lives easier, many external disks are formatted using an old-style file system called FAT32. They do this so people still running Windows 98 (and ME, 95, and 95 OSR2) can have plug-and-play. If you are still running one of those versions of Windows, then the rest of this page will be of little use to you.

Most people, on the other hand, are running Windows XP (Home, Professional, SP1, SP2). WinXP's native file system (called