On Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:59:03 -0400 "Stephen P Molnar" <s.molnar@sbcglobal.net> wrote: <snipped>

Thanks for your reply.

What MS formatting tool do you recommend. I have to say that MS win7 doesn't recognize the drive as I put another linux distro on it. That's not quite correct, the device manager finds it as a Seagate Desktop USB Device.

If I use c:\format at the command line how do I identify the external drive? I guess that what I'm asking is how do I query the OS for the drive ID in order to format the drive without destroying anything else?

Thanks, again for your reply to this query.

Hi Stephen, "Kind and Gentle Guidance" :-) --> It is customary on this list to bottom post, not top post, and to reply to the list only. This is so other people running into similar situations can benefit from the entire discussion and not have difficulty following it. On to your topic: As memory serves me, if you right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'Manage' you'll see a number of 'snap-ins' populating a tree view on the left (I /think/ they're called 'snap-ins'; could be wrong) Select the one called 'storage' and then the one below that called 'disk management' You click on the device you want to manage, to select it, and then right-click on it to select one of the options. In this case, you want to a) create a partition and format it vfat, while b) leaving the remainder of the drive space "unallocated." When it's done, you "safely remove" the drive and proceed to install the real operating system :-) hth & regards, Carl P.S.: I'm certain we'll be set straight if I've erred somewhere, which is possible (not likely) but these things fade from memory more and more the longer you can avoid doing them. ;-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org