USB Harddrive - reformat?

Does anyone have suggestions on how to reformat an external USB harddrive? I have a 40GB drive that is manufactured by Buslink. It is formatted with FAT32 and I want to convert to NTFS, but when I attempt to use the Windows format command I get a message saying the drive is not accessible. Is there some kind of protection on an external drive? If there is, can it be bypassed? If there's no protection, what am I doing wrong?

Any help offered would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Shannon

 

I have a USB ThumbDrive and have no problem formating it from in windows. And I also have a buddy with an external hardrive (firewire) that he has no trouble formatting either. Both from in windows.

But maybe this is what you have to do.
http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/05/108205.aspx

Just a note, I use Win2K and my buddy uses XPPro with firewire, so maybe we haven't run into this.

HH

 

Should be a cake walk - use disk management inside of windows. Either XP or 2K.