File format for USB external hard drive enclosure

[AlanV]

Can someone confirm for me that a Windows 2000/XP system will be able to read/write to a hard drive formatted as FAT32? I use Windows 98SE at home but need to support friends with 2000/XP (assuming they have USB 2.0 ports), and I'm planning to buy a USB enclosure kit for a spare 18GB drive. I'd like to use this drive for reference material and support programs when working on other PC's, and perhaps bring some large files from the office to work on at home.

Thanks, Alan

[spyder003]

Yup, XP can read FAT32.

[bailey]

it sure can, I have dual boot on my system and xp can see everything on my w98se drive.

[Cricket]

WinXP can "see" NTSF and FAT32.

Win98SE can only "see" FAT32. It can't "see" NTSF.

Cricket

[AlanV]

Thanks to all of you for your responses, but I'm still uncertain about write capability. Can 2000/XP write to my proposed FAT32 removable disk?

[glc]

Yes.

[scotferg]

You bet. I fix computers for a living and do this all the time to extract data off of hard drives with damaged boot sectors or viruses or bad motherboards, any reason really. A lot of networked situations I've setup or seen have XP talking to 98. In a single pc with a master/slave config then XP needs to be the OS, 98 can definitely not read or write to and XP unless it was setup with a fat32 partition which is not good.