Formatting HD to FAT32?

Your 500GB drive is below the 2TB max so you should be able to format it to FAT32. I'd give that tool tyttebøvs linked a shot and if there's still problems I'd try doing a full NTFS format just to see if it works.
 
Well, a few suggestions here.

1) FAT file systems suck, unless you are using it on a small device like a thumb drive, or a small HD (8 gigs or under).

2) You can always toss them on a thumb drive or a DVD and toss them in your DVD player that supports divx

3) If you have cross platforms (ie windows and Linux) file systems do not matter if networking is involved, because they do not locally access the file systems. They do it over SMB (samba) which does not require anything to match file system wise.

If you really want to use the large drive as fat, try Gparted live CD and boot from it and format your drive that way.
 
I mentioned earlier that the "independent platform" releases of GParted live for cd would most likely lack detection of an external usb type drive for this. The free tool is written for the usb type external drives as well as internal ide and sata models. For simply storing files NTFS would make things far easier with the improvements in file systems there.

The alternative is something like the usb to ide or sata type adapter for seeing a dos type partitioning tool used. That''s the hard way to go since a free tool is onhand. As far as I'm concerned here tyttebovs made a good catch when finding the drive tool there. With WD Workbooks and other brands seeing external usb drives it was a matter of time before a suitable partitioning tool became available(free that is).
 
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