I have a disk in an external enclosure, using a USB2 connection to my Windows XP PC. I recently had a problem with it, but finally managed to reformat it. The problem now is that I only have the option to do this using the NTFS file system, but I would like to use FAT32 instead. Is there any way of forcing XP to allow me this option?

There is a hot fix for this problem for external memory devices. If you are using the external disk as additional storage and not as a boot disk, it might apply to your situation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906472/en-us

Many thanks for the quick reply. As it turns out, I have now realised that a FAT32 system cannot be set up on a disk larger than 32GB, not using standard Windows XP techniques, anyway. So I made a 32GB partiton, which formatted successfully in FAT32! Now I have another problem. I want to copy a 4.29 GB file into that partition, but Windows insists that "there is not enough free disk space", which is nonsense. I guess the message must mean, as Windows messages so often do, something other than what it says, but I can't guess what. Any clues, anyone? (Please....)

   Each file system has its limits concerning the size of the drive and the size of individual files.  NTFS limits are so high that you should not have a problem with it, but the problem with NTFS is that it is not accessible from MSDOS.
   My guess is that the file size is too big for FAT32.

Ray, you are absolutely correct :)
The maximum file size for a FAT 32 partition is 4 GB.
See this article for an explanation by Microsoft.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328679/en-us

Many thanks again. I guess that's the end of that! I was hoping to transfer my file to a Windows 98 system, but it looks as if that won't be possible. I think I'll go away and do something more interesting instead....
Thanks to both Ray and dlwolff0 for trying to help.