partitioning and formating external USB hard drive

[everlast]

I have a new 80 GB portable USB hard drive, and i want to partiton it, leaving 10GB on NTFS or FAT32, and leaving 70 GB on ext3

1) Can windowsXP (I'm still forced to use Winblows, but not for long ) read from a disk that is formated with FAT 32? which is better to use if I need to read files I saved in Winblows on Linux SUSE 10.3?
2) Can I:
a) format and partition the portable hard drive from console?
b) do I need to use a third party partitioning software?

if (b) : is there open source partitioner to use, i've tried googleing it, but with no success

please help, it's quite urgent.

[numberwhun]

I have a new 80 GB portable USB hard drive, and i want to partiton it, leaving 10GB on NTFS or FAT32, and leaving 70 GB on ext3

1) Can windowsXP (I'm still forced to use Winblows, but not for long ) read from a disk that is formated with FAT 32? which is better to use if I need to read files I saved in Winblows on Linux SUSE 10.3?
2) Can I:
a) format and partition the portable hard drive from console?
b) do I need to use a third party partitioning software?

if (b) : is there open source partitioner to use, i've tried googleing it, but with no success

please help, it's quite urgent.

1) Windows XP can read Fat 32 just as easily as it can NTFS.

2. a) Not sure
b) Yes, but I am guessing you didn't search very hard. Gparted works well for this.

NOTE: It doesn't matter to us how urgent it is for you. We are all volunteers and not bound by your urgencies.

Regards,

Jeff

[Nepomuk]

I have a new 80 GB portable USB hard drive, and i want to partiton it, leaving 10GB on NTFS or FAT32, and leaving 70 GB on ext3

1) Can windowsXP (I'm still forced to use Winblows, but not for long ) read from a disk that is formated with FAT 32? which is better to use if I need to read files I saved in Winblows on Linux SUSE 10.3?

Windows can read FAT32 and NTFS easily, but Linux still has difficulties regarding NTFS, so if you want to use that partition for both OSes, I'd use FAT32.

2) Can I:
a) format and partition the portable hard drive from console?
b) do I need to use a third party partitioning software?

if (b) : is there open source partitioner to use, i've tried googleing it, but with no success

If you're using Linux to partition and format, you can use "Gparted" or "Qparted" as suggested by numberwhun, both use the command line tool "parted". I don't know however about a command line tool for Windows.
There is of course the normal Partitioning Tool under WindowsXP (you can access that through Start -> All programs -> Management (or similar) -> Computer Management (or similar)). However, you'll not be able to format any partition to ext3 with that, so you'll just have to leave the 70GB partition unformated until you can access Linux.

Greetings,
Nepomuk