Formatting my usb external hard drive

i formatted my passport 500gb using the vista os,but when it came to the new partition i tried for over 7 days to set it to ntfs unsuccessfully ,so i set it to exfat.now its not recognised on xp and then when i downloaded the diagnostic itility and tried to use it to format,it told me i couldnt and that i should check my cable.i downloaded the usb/firewire 32 utility but every time i try to install i’m told that a programme needed to let it run could not be run and so the installation ends(i disabled my antivirus software for this,yet the same response)now i dont have the sync software ,when i downloaded from the wdc site i get a file about 12kb in size.i will really appreciate any help to format the drive properly and be able to download and install the ryt software onto it,thank you in advance.

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ExFAT is targeted for UNIX/Linux based OS. It is normal that poor XP will not see it.

Just format it as NTFS with deafults, do not change the allocation size.

it took about 24 hrs to format to about 3%,when i chose ntfs so i cancelled