As I was saying before, these drives are used in audioplayers and not in computers. They are driven by a firmware board, no software.

Anyway, it seems that it may be the particular two drives. Most of the other drives I tried seem fine with this process. There are two drives we have that just failed the process.

Very strange.

UMMMMMMM man get a clue NTFS is a filesystem designed to have NT and its derivites such as 2k and XP run more efiiciently, have better security, less file fragmantation, along with other bennifits. I know we are talking Microsoft junk here but if locking was a real issue then they wouldn't make NTFS the prefered filesystem and inoquvically state this. My copy of 2k has tagged and formatted a partition fat32 over 32gb. Could it be because its a MSDN copy or 2k itself is capable. After the drive was partitioned and formatted it ran fine in win98se with a 40gb drive as one partition. I am just going by prior experience with this question. Sorry I just assumed XP would be the same.

jchance, I think you are missing the point. Forget NTFS. I am locked into FAT32 because the firmware boards on our music players must have FAT32. This is a hardware player NOT a computer. No security issue, no fragmentation, no nothing, just a drive with music files.

I am not championing one file format over the other. That isn't the issue. The drive MUST have FAT32.