Formatting 1tb in FAT32

dazz25 · 4 Jan 2010 at 19:32

Hi all,

Does anybody know of any software that will format a 1tb external drive in FAT32?

It's for a friend that wants to use it for his PS3!

Cheers

marc2003 · 4 Jan 2010 at 19:40

won't windows disk management do it? (start, diskmgmt.msc)

edit: just checked. nope. you could create the partition and assign it a drive letter. then try formatting it from a command prompt..

format x: /q /fs:fat32

(where x: is your drive letter)

Daegan · 4 Jan 2010 at 19:42

Or just diskpart.

format fs=fat32 quick

(list and select the disk first

)

dazz25 · 4 Jan 2010 at 20:16

marc2003 said:
won't windows disk management do it? (start, diskmgmt.msc)

edit: just checked. nope. you could create the partition and assign it a drive letter. then try formatting it from a command prompt..

format x: /q /fs:fat32

(where x: is your drive letter)

I've already tried in command prompt and it says 'The format is to big for FAT32'

Daegan said:
Or just diskpart.

format fs=fat32 quick

(list and select the disk first )

I've done as you've said above and it gives me a list of commands that can be used and format is not in the list!

As far as i'm aware it can't be done in windows. I've done it before using other software but I can't remember what it was called!

marc2003 · 4 Jan 2010 at 20:18

if you use diskpart, you need to select the disk first eg

select disk 0

(use "list disk" to find out the number)

Sin_Chase · 4 Jan 2010 at 20:19

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

Used it last week on a 500GB volume.

dazz25 · 4 Jan 2010 at 20:24

marc2003 said:
if you use diskpart, you need to select the disk first eg

select disk 0

(use "list disk" to find out the number)

Yeh this is what I did but it doesn't work!

Here's a screenshot of what it's displaying:

Am I doing something wrong?

Daegan · 4 Jan 2010 at 20:25

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
format fs=fat32 quick

dazz25 · 4 Jan 2010 at 20:39

Sin_Chase said:
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

Used it last week on a 500GB volume.

Thats worked fine. Thanks for the link, i'll make sure that goes in my favourites!

Daegan said:
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
format fs=fat32 quick

Ah...of course! I'm formatting the partition not the disk!

The link from Sin_Chase worked but thanks for the help anyway

Tiamat21 · 4 Jan 2010 at 21:38

Lol best ps3 hard drive ever XD
How would you get the ps3 firmware onto it just for a quick question.

dazz25 · 4 Jan 2010 at 21:50

I'm not to sure!

It's for a friend so i'm not sure what he does with it after i've formatted. I think he only uses it for storage i.e movies and music instead of streaming. The original hard drive is still used to run the PS3 etc.

Frenzy · 5 Jan 2010 at 16:57

thought id just mention swissknife does this on internal and usb hard drives. You have to start it as admin i think.

dazz25 · 5 Jan 2010 at 17:09

I tried swissknife but it would only do half of the drive and leave 500GB unallocated.

Couldn't figure out why it was doing that!

Manlove is my forte · 5 Jan 2010 at 17:28

The reason windows does not allow Fat32 to have filesystems greater than 32GB is because the bigger the FAT filesystem the slower it performs. So MS locked the filesystem to 32GB as they deemed performance for filesystems greater than that as simply unacceptable.

DustyMiller · 5 Jan 2010 at 18:39

Manlove is my forte said:
The reason windows does not allow Fat32 to have filesystems greater than 32GB is because the bigger the FAT filesystem the slower it performs. So MS locked the filesystem to 32GB as they deemed performance for filesystems greater than that as simply unacceptable.

Totally wrong. the maximum size of a Fat32 disk is 8Tb.

Fat32 was limited to 32Gb on a Windows XP install ( No SP's applied)

Read the basic specs here: MS Q314463