formatting an external hard drive?

[horrible]

I've been reading about buying an external hard drive and some say "isn't formatted". I already know that internal drives aren't fully formatted and I have a vague idea of how to format them.

To the point, is formatting an external hard drive the same as formatting an internal one?

Also, can they support an operating system?

[Chicken Little]

In a word yes. Some are like usb devices in which once you plug them in the PC will recognise the storage medium and then provide prompts to format the medium to be used, if no prompts occur you'll then need to manually find it (start -> control panel -> system [hardware tab] -> device manager) and you should be able to check properties if the PC is actually seeing it (or if you've already gone past this) Administrative tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Partitions and viola select the drive click format and run through it.

Yes they can support an OS once formatted, be wary though as sometimes the front side bus & USB ports fails to initialise if you have problems with them making a reliance on them risky.

[Setzophone]

Heck, it's not a bad idea to format an external drive when you get it, anyway. Mine was in FAT32, which I didn't notice until it was too late. Now I really wish I had formatted it when I first got it, damned filesize limits!

[horrible]

what about programs like partitionmagic? will they work on an external drive?

[Chicken Little]

what about programs like partitionmagic? will they work on an external drive?

I would assume so, I personally don't use one so I can't speak from experience but I don't see why it wouldn't if you connected at boot, it showed up in set up. really it's just liek an internal drive only not connected by IDE / SATA / Firewire and instead USB.

@FAT32, indeed it's crap, everytime I see my usb stick I shake my head in disgust at it only being FAT32 since it's an old model. :P

[NovasLogic]

If you don't see the USB drive there is also a hidden partition manager in windows xp when you right click my computer, select manage, and go to disk manage. Its one of the problems when you go my route and buy an external enclosure and a hard drive instead of just buying them put together preformatted.

To format it, you just right click the unformatted drive, and tell windows to format.