I'll soon be getting a new laptop with Windows Vista or Windows 7 and turning my current laptop into a Linux box. Since FAT32 works out of the box on both Windows and Linux machines and I've had some problems with Linux and working with NTFS drives in the past (although things might have gotten better - I'll be playing around with it, for sure), I want to back up my important files to my external hard drive, but I want it in FAT32 format for the time being. The only option there is when I go to format the drive is NTFS, though.

How can I force Windows XP to format my external hard drive as a FAT32 drive?

I'll soon be getting a new laptop with Windows Vista or Windows 7 and turning my current laptop into a Linux box. Since FAT32 works out of the box on both Windows and Linux machines and I've had some problems with Linux and working with NTFS drives in the past (although things might have gotten better - I'll be playing around with it, for sure), I want to back up my important files to my external hard drive, but I want it in FAT32 format for the time being. The only option there is when I go to format the drive is NTFS, though.

How can I force Windows XP to format my external hard drive as a FAT32 drive? Or has Linux support for reading and writing NTFS gotten good enough where it doesn't matter anymore?