If anyone has done disk backups using the DOS Ghost client (or other DOS based clients) you have probably had some issues with NTFS. Don’t get me wrong, NTFS is a pretty decent file system, but FAT32 is noticeably more compatible.

Getting a drive that’s NTFS to work on DOS/MAC/Pre-Windows 98/Linux is sometimes a PITA.

Most external drives come preformatted as FAT32 for this very reason. If you need it NTFS that’s no big deal – just open up the disk manager in Windows and blast away (diskmgmt.msc). Windows, however, has a limit on formatting for FAT partitions: 32GB. Whoopie.

The easiest way is to use a disk formatting utility (Hiren’s has some good ones on there). The second easiest is to use DOS style commands.

Start
Run
CMD
format /FS:FAT32 G:
Y

The command can be broken down as follows:
Format – this is the actual command
/FS:FAT32 – Filesystem Fat32
G: – the drive letter of the drive you want to reformat

***EDIT***
Apparently you can also use several freeware programs. One that was given to me is called Swissknife.