GUEST Harrison. You apparently used the mudcat "linkmaker" that sometimes fails by adding some extraneous mudcatmudbits to the URL. Some people use it with no problems but I'm not quite that smart, I guess.

Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP (KB314463)

Gurney -

I'm not sure you can still buy a 500 MB hard drive??? The smallest in stock at retailers in my area seem to be 20GB, so far as I've seen. I also suspect you meant 500 GB?

Should you decide on an external USB hard drive, I'll warn you of a "negative experience" recently with a particular Western Digital one.

Most new hard drives come with some "trashware" preinstalled, and occasionally they have something useful that might help get the drive mounted. In one portable external USB 500GB Western Digital Drive they cleverly(?) "formatted a partition as an optical drive" and put all the garbage there. You can't write to the optical partition so it's pretty much useless, and you can't delete the trash that's there.

The problem is that the "optical drive" mounts as another drive separate from the actual (writable) hard drive, and it acts like a DVD drive with a disk in it so that everytime something pings at the USB controller you get the popup asking what you want to do with the "unknown disk" in the optical drive.

Western Digital does say that you can "disable" the optical portion, but it requires an "update to BIOS" and it permanently deletes that part of the device so that it can never be restored. (They're not really clear whether the BIOS update is for your computer - a permanent injury - or to a BIOS internal to the drive.) The optical partition is nearly 100 GB of the drive capacity you paid for, so whether or not you delete/disable it you only get a 400 GB drive to use, not the 500GB you paid for.

There are NO INDICATIONS on the external packaging to indicate any difference, so I don't know if this "feature" appears in any other models of their drives, but I won't buy another WD until I get some new assurances - that WD doesn't seem willing to provide.

Wanting a new HD would be most likely if you can verify that you could use NTFS or one of the other formats suggested with your recorder, but on a larger drive you could format an appropriate sized partition with FAT32 and use another format for the rest of the drive.

John