When working from a Windows environment (particularly Windows XP), you may experience difficulty using the default Windows format tool to format your large external USB hard drive as Fat32. This is due in part to the fact that the Windows format tool can only format a drive using the Fat32 if the drive is 32GB or smaller. While a great number of external hard drives are being manufactured with capacities in excess of 40GB we indeed need another method of formatting these devices using a single Fat32 partition. After dabbling a bit with a few different free software formatting tools that are launchable from within Windows, I have come to a nice solution. The utility is called CompuApps SwissKnife and works great for those that need to format their USB hard drives from a Windows XP environment. SwissKnife is a stand alone solution that will allow you to format your external USB devices as Fat32 so that the information you put on the device can be read across multiple operating platforms. This is great since some of us are using Linux, Unix and other operating environments along with Windows and wish to access our data via these platforms. Below is a simple screenshot of the application: The application is easy to navigate and straightforward to use. It is completely free to use and you can grab it from HERE The product website is HERE