I need to format a small 40GB external HDD into FAT32 for use with my car stereo. Dose anyone now of any good free programs i can use on my Vistaor XP machine to do this. XP dosen't seeem to have a option for this, all i can see is the option to format it as NTFS, wich i did by mistake.
FAT32 Formating
- Thread starter cobrax
- Start date
Windows won't let you format FAT32 on partitions greater than 32Gb for marketing rather than technical reasons. Any of the Linux based recovery/utility CD things should be able to do it or I believe that there's a fully functional trial of Partition Magic available which should be a smaller download.
No problems . Take the side of your PC case , disconnect the IDE cable to your existing drive , disconnect the power cable too .Take the drive from out of the external case and link this 40 gig to the IDE cable on your PC , link the power cable too . Boot up , go into the BIOS ,change the first boot to floppy . Get a boot disk from bootdiskdotcom first and start up the PC .Use the fdisk command to delete existing partitions , then create partition and finally format . Swop over the drives and put the cases together.
This is by no means a complicated business although it may look it. It really only takes minutes to do. I have five external drives ,but they were empty enclosures when I bought them , you just add your own hard drives and this is what I did for them . You should really have a boot disk in any case , sometimes they come in handy.
This is by no means a complicated business although it may look it. It really only takes minutes to do. I have five external drives ,but they were empty enclosures when I bought them , you just add your own hard drives and this is what I did for them . You should really have a boot disk in any case , sometimes they come in handy.
Oh , well two of my five drives are 2.5 inch in a aluminium case with two screws at either end .I used the adapters that fit on these laptop drives and then plug into the standard IDE cables inside my PC .That's the easy part , as you said I dont know how you would boot without a floppy . I dont know if by transfering the bootdisk files to a CD would work .I know you can boot from network/external device/CD/floppy/USB ,but the bootdisk will format to FAT32 and it is normally used on a floppy disk.For this very reason , I will always keep a floppy drive in my PC's .This is a difficult one .