How to format a USB drive on window machines (fat32)

For windows 7 (will work with recent windows such as vista and xp, I think)

Click on your “start” menu. Put in “cmd” on your search box, right at the bottom this search option is found.

This will open the cmd (command terminal)

Write this

format /FS:FAT32 X:  

where X is your USB drive (in my case it was H:) Be very careful and 100% sure, you don’t want to delete other drives contents.

Hit enter (may be twice depending on what information is being supplied to you. From here it should be an easy job to re-format your drive)

I am thinking of installing Linux by booting from USB drive on my INTEX windows-7, 32 bit machine  I purchased recently with a samsung screen .  [http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/ ]How big? well its an amazing gadget, I really didn’t check it’s size.

My laptop is 64 bit windows 7, sony vaio, so mostly I will do the same kind of software installations. Check my previous articles for how I installed CygWIN etc on my laptop and produced Feynman diagrams with TIKF codes that I developed by taking hints from … [category: Information Technology]

I want to install Linux on my newly purchased machines: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

If I am successful with Linux booting from my USB drive (which I formatted just now, I will try to install Linux on my INTEX desktop side by side with windows,  dual booting is a matter of past now, didn’t know that, I’m a slow swimmer, btw my pen drive is an 8 GB SanDisk that I purchased from RadioShack in Williamsburg, VA near the Williamsburg hospitality house and college of william and mary for 54$ in November 2006 (I know the exact time and date). If I can do windows-Linux single booting I will go for USB booting and single booting on my laptop. Just updating you with my ambitions.

The remaining technical matters at hand are how to take care of my dead macintosh. Well it’s not so much dead as opposed to a hearing impaired war-fellow. I can’t key in passwords as my lovy dovey niece pour water on my keyboard as a prank. She didn’t know that destroyed the ear-drums of my apple G4 Powerbook and I am thinking to remove it’s internal hard drives to saviour the data by putting it in a window capable hard drive case.

But to what good, the last time I did so was two years ago, I put the, the then hard drive of my Powerbook in a window capable case, but it’s not being read by my window systems [Who says you can’t have two ‘the’s consecutively in a sentence?]. SO what now? I have to figure out (search etc) if a mac os journaled file system is amenable to conversion/legibility to FAT 32 windows I have. Windows make amazing progress from their fat 32 to fat 1 tera byte but apple cries “bite me”. SO we’ll see or we will write an online petition.

Adios.

Manmohan

PS: since my BSNL ISP kept failing me repeatedly (a frequent occurrence in the last 3 years) to download the LINUX OS file I searched for my other technical difficulties namely (viz.) [ MacOS FS << >> FAT32/NTFS ] look what I found, an answer to my query: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2812983?start=0&tstart=0  all I need now is to find a free 3rd party driver that helps windows read my files from my macintosh hard drives (I have 4 of these, two from my apple G4 Power-Book and 2 Maxtor-III one touch hard drives that belongs to my ex-employer) If I can read my macOS formatted files this will save me my important data from my previous machines and this will also prove that when I formatted my Maxtor hard drives to the Journaled FS type several years ago (2005 !!) I did see it coming that someone has to develop these softwares because million of people will run into trouble if they don’t. Businesses run on such principle: eg someone in Apple computers might have thought the exact same thing, “Steve, we don’t have to develop these software, we develop ours, windows develops their’s and some 3rd party will come along from Chihuahua or Philippines who will develop for us software that will help mediate between us the bull rivals”. The bulls never worry about their balls getting smashed in a fight because they didn’t see things coming.

Now the free 3rd party software: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-1088460.html

http://www.catacombae.org/hfsx.html