Just (today) bought a Verbatim 1TB USB-3[1] external drive for general
backup purposes, plus transferring data between computers - all Windoze,
but a mixture of XP, W7-32bit and W7-64bit.

It came formatted as Fat32, and there appears to be a single partition
occupying the whole of its 1TB capacity.

However, the on-disk manual which came with it seems to suggest that
Fat32 partitions are limited to a maximum of 32GB. I know that to be
untrue because I've got a 64GB thumb drive which is formatted as Fat32 -
and that's definitely got more than 32GB of data on it. Some sources
seem to suggest that the default Windoze format command cannot format
more than 32GB at a time in Fat32 but there are third-party alternatives
which can.

Can anyone shed any light on this please?

The manual suggests that users may want to create multiple partitions on
the disk - possibly a mixture of Fat32 (for maximum transportability)
and NTFS (for fewer size - presumably both partition size *and* file
size - limitations). If I understand it correctly, it's telling me to
delete the existing partition - so the whole thing becomes unallocated
space - and then create the required new partitions. Questions:
a) is this necessary?
b) if I delete the existing partition, presumably the documents and
software which came on the disk will be lost unless I copy it all
elsewhere first?
c) If I create multiple partitions (say, 1 fat32 primary, 1 Extended -
containing several NTFS logical partitions) and give each one a drive
letter, will the drive letters change depending on which system it's
connected to at any one time - or do I need to choose drive letters
which won't conflict with those in use on *any* of the systems to which
I will connect it?
d) if I back up my operating systems, using something like Paragon
Rescue & Backup software (which is stand-alone, and boots from a CD)
will that software be able to see all the partitions? [My current
thoughts are that I will use a separate partition for each system I'm
backing up - so that each one is self-contained].

I think I know broadly what I want to achieve, but I feel that I need to
understand all the issues before starting to muck about with this new disk.

Any constructive comments will be greatly appreciated.



[1] It's backwards compatible with USB-2, which is how I shall be using
it - in the short term, at any rate.
--
Cheers,
Roger
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