A customer has a dlink di-624S wireless router.

It seems like a nice unit (except for scant documentation). I particularly like the 2 USB ports.

I had previously set it up (wireless network and network printing).

This time, he needs to connect an external 3.5″ 200Gb USB drive, and make it available on his network.

The drive was meant to go into one of his PCs, but the PC motherboard had some serious issues with running SATA and IDE drives at the same time (despite gamedude saying otherwise).

Before I got there, he had been using the HDD plugged into the usb port on one of his PCs.

So I connect to the 624S, and there is just 1 page, with a handful of options for configuring a usb drive.

OK, this should be easy. I change one option, so that there is no “security” on sharing the drive… There’s no point in worrying about security, as he is behind a firewall, and its just him and his wife.

But the drive doesn’t show up under my network places…

A quick web search shows that the 624s doesn’t seem to support ntfs (just FAT32)… now thats annoying.

I test it by using my 2Gb usb pen-drive… and network sharing works great.

Since the drive is ntfs, and contains data that needs to be saved, I connect it to the PCs usb port, so I can backup the data, before I format it to FAT32.

But windows (vista) says something about a drive error… oh no, I have a bad feeling about this.

vista makes the “usb detected” sound, but “disk management” doesn’t show anything. How am I going to format it to FAT32, if I cant see the raw drive?

I plug it into a nearby XP system, but get the same results…

At this point, the customer suggests switching the drive off, then on.

I figure its worth a try… if the file system is stuffed, then it won’t make any difference anyway.

And it works!

So I transfer the 70 Gb of data to the PCs internal drive… but vista decides it will take 40 minutes to copy the data.

OK, I’ll have to show the customer how to reformat the drive, as I don’t want to hang around for over half an hour.

As I go through the motions of formatting the drive, I see Vista only seems to allow the drive to be formatted using one of 2 filesystems: ntfs, and exfat.

Ok, I go to the XP box, and show the customer how to format the drive using FAT32.

I’ll need to find out what this exfat thing is.

Its a shame vista doesn’t allow formatting fat32 drives (how difficult can it be?).