device compatibility

[blame]

hey all, new here so first off i'll say hi!

i've had a couple of kenwood decks over the years, and always had a 4gb ipod attached to the usb input (all voiceindexed through pmm) and working wonderfully.  the constant desire for more space led me to purchase a 16gb usb stick, and after i formatted it into FAT32, loaded the music and voiceindexed it through pmm, it worked wonderfully as well!  now my project that i am getting stumped on: i recently put a new 500gb hdd into my laptop, and a little lightbulb flashed in my head.  seeing as 2.5" laptop hard drives don't need an external power source when in an external case, they get the power from the usb port itself, i thought it might be something worthwhile to try and put into my car.

i picked up a usb external case for the 160gb hdd i was pulling out, (eventually) managed to get it departitioned and formatted all into FAT32 like both the ipod and usb stick were, vista and xp both have un unnatural obsession with NTFS for anything over 32gb..   unfortunately, pmm isn't recognizing the external drive as a compatible device, as in it doesn't pop up in the list when i plug it in, and no option to save and eject which would usually get the voice indexing files rolling.

has anyone done this before?  does anyone know a way to maybe partition the drive in a way that the media manager would recognize it or even just convince pmm it's a flash drive instead of a hard drive?

sorry for the long read and thanks in advance if anyone has any ideas!

-sean