In a prior post, I stumbled across vistas options for formatting drives (it appears that the only choices are ntfs and exFAT).

Now thats going to cause problems with a lot of devices than need FAT32 (usb thumbdrives and mp3 players spring to mind).

So what is exFAT?

its really “FAT64”, but its totally incompatible with FAT32 and FAT16… so XP cannot handle exFAT drives.

Looks like Vista has painted itself into a corner on this (once again!)

While investigating this, I also noticed that XP artificially limits the size of (formatting) FAT32 drives to 32Gb… while FAT32 can actually handle drives up to 2Tb in size.

But I found a useful guide at: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm which allows a disk up to 2Tb to be formatted as FAT32 (the format program even works with vista!).