That’s not a problem unless the disk that you want to format is larger than 32 Gigabytes. If you open the formatting options in Windows for such a drive, you will notice that only NTFS is selectable from the file system pulldown menu.

That’s because of an artificial limit of 32 Gigabytes. Fat32 is only selectable in the graphical user interface if the disk is not larger than 32 Gigabytes. With today’s hard drives, that’s seldom the case. You could partition the drive first to create a partition of 32 Gigabytes or less, but that could lead to other compatibility issues.

A few solutions are available to format those drives to Fat32. The command line tool format does not have the same restrictions as the gui. Your first option is therefor to format the drive from the command line.

Use the hotkey Windows-r to bring up the run box. Type cmd and hit enter. Now enter the following command to format a selected drive to Fat32. A: refers to the drive letter, make sure you change it to the correct drive. The /q parameter enables quick format, if you like a normal format instead remove it from the command.

format /FS:FAT32 /q A:

Working with the command line may not be to everyone’s liking. If you prefer a graphical user interface you can download the freeware Fat32Formatter which gives you similar options.

The program is portable which means you can run it right after you have unpacked it to a local drive. You select the drive that you want to format from the physical drive pulldown menu at the top. Information get populated automatically by the software on each selection.

All partitions of the drive are displayed, and you need to select the partition that you want to format. This step is mandatory even if there is only one partition. Additional information are displayed after selection, including the used and empty space on the drive.

You can specify a size and volume label for the newly formatted partition. Users who are in a hurry can enable quick format to speed up the formatting. A click on start formats the drive.

Several hard drive manufacturers are offering tools for their hard drives to format hard drives larger than 32 Gigabytes to Fat32. You may want to check their homepages to find those tools. Most free and commercial partitioning tools can do that as well.

Users who want to create multiple partitions need a file called Hitachi Microdrive which contains the new driver that we are going to modify first and install afterwards. Unpack the package to a new directory on the hard drive. The first step is to find out the exact name of the USB stick that we want to use that way. The information can be found in the Windows Registry. Pressing [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [Enter] will load the Registry editor.

The information are located in subkeys of the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USBSTOR. The name of the USB stick can be found by clicking on the [+] sign in front of the key. All USB devices should be listed there. The name of the USB stick can be copied by left-clicking the subkey, right-clicking afterwards and selecting Copy Key Name from the context menu.

The key needs to be modified because it contains the full path. The best way to do that is to paste the contents into a text editor and remove all chars before Disk&Ven.

Now that this is done we need to copy the part that is left into the Windows Clipboard again by selecting the text and pressing [CTRL C]

The driver information needs to be edited in the next step before the new drivers for the USB stick are installed. Load the file cfadisk.inf in an text editor and locate the [cfadisk_device] section.

Replace the chars IDE\DiskIBM-DSCM-11000__________________________SC2IC801 in the first line with the name of the USB stick that you are going to use. Remove every other line in the category so that only the line with our modified USB stick name is shown in there.

The driver is now prepared and can be installed for the USB stick. Open the Windows Control Panel, the System category and there the Hardware tab. A click on Device Manager will load the Windows Device Manager which lists the computer hardware. The USB stick should be located in the Disk Drives category. Right-click the USB stick and select Update Driver from the context menu.

The Hardware Update wizard should pop up. Select the option Install from a list or specific location in the window and click next.

Check the Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install option in the next window and click next again.

A click on Have Disk in the next window will open a file browser. Locate and pick the file cfadisk.inf that has been modified previously. Clicking on OK will check the driver and show a warning message that the driver is not digitally signed. Press next on that screen.

Ignore the warning message and continue by clicking Yes. Windows should now start the installation of the driver for the USB stick and display a message that it finished the installation.

Windows is now requesting a reboot of the system to load the updated drivers properly. The USB stick should now be recognized as a hard drive. This makes it possible to create multiple partitions on the USB stick with a software partition program.

Please note that only systems with the updated drivers will recognize the additional partitions. Connected the USB stick to a computer without the modified drivers will only show the first partition of the USB stick.

By default USB devices are optimized for quick removal in Windows XP. If you want to format your USB device as NTFS you need to change that to optimize them for performance. This has however direct impact on how you remove the device from your system. You need to remove it safely if you really changed that option otherwise severe data loss might occur.

I don’t want to go deeper into the topic but I guess it does not make sense to format your USB device as NTFS considering the prospect of data loss if you miss to plug it off safely. Still it`s good to know I think.