Help Needed with formating an Ext USB harddrive for use with PS3

chaparral · 26 Feb 2013 at 16:13

I bought a 320GB Ext USB harddrive to use with my PS3
But when I tried to format it to FAT32 it got up to 298GB and then failed saying the volume is to big for fat32

I took a screen grab of the fail problem..

Is it not possible to format this size harddrive to FAT32 for use with a PS3 ??

chaparral · 26 Feb 2013 at 16:24

I just got the same error when I tried using HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

K1LLSW1TCH · 26 Feb 2013 at 16:38

You're going to need a different Fat 32 formatter. The Windows one won't work as it will only format small amounts, I think the limit it sets is 32GB or something silly. That HP tool probably just uses the Windows method but adds a more user friendly front end. You need to download a different formatting tool, just Google because there are hundreds.

chaparral · 26 Feb 2013 at 16:40

K1LLSW1TCH said:
or I was under the impression you could just put it into the PS3 and it'll format it for you

This is what I was going to try next..

K1LLSW1TCH · 26 Feb 2013 at 16:44

chaparral said:
This is what I was going to try next..

I ninja edited that part because I wasn't sure if it is the case for USB drives, try it and see.

ic1male · 26 Feb 2013 at 16:59

Get this piece of software. I've had no problems using it in the past.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm

chaparral · 26 Feb 2013 at 17:09

K1LLSW1TCH said:
I ninja edited that part because I wasn't sure if it is the case for USB drives, try it and see.

I took it out of the ext USB case and put inside the PS3 and formated it..

And then I took it out of the PS3 and put it back into it USB cabbie..But the PS3 still couldn't see it...

ps3ud0 · 26 Feb 2013 at 17:14

ic1male said:
Get this piece of software. I've had no problems using it in the past.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm

Yeah was just gonna find the link myself - Ive used that before and it works. MS just decided to make an artifical limit on the size of the HDD FAT32 can format (i.e. they want you to use NTFS

)

ps3ud0 :cool:

chaparral · 26 Feb 2013 at 17:32

Thanks guys for the replys and help...

I ended up using a program called Swissknife

My PS3 is saying 1 hour 10minutes to only backup about 29GB...

mame · 27 Feb 2013 at 19:28

I've never tried this but couldn't you delete that volume/partition and create a new one of say 250gb and format that as FAT32, leaving the left over space as un-partitioned space

chaparral · 1 Mar 2013 at 06:46

Is this right

The 320GB harddrive I put inside my FAT PS3 and formatted it with the PS3 shows up as 298GB in the PS3 software and says there around 263GB available space

ic1male · 1 Mar 2013 at 10:08

Yes, a formatted drive is always less than the advertised capacity. So that explains the missing 22GB. Then the PS3 reserves a certain amount for caching. So there's the rest.

chaparral · 1 Mar 2013 at 17:55

ic1male said:
Yes, a formatted drive is always less than the advertised capacity. So that explains the missing 22GB. Then the PS3 reserves a certain amount for caching. So there's the rest.

Thanks....

I was surprised when I done a full format that it only took 29 hours...

ps3ud0 · 1 Mar 2013 at 18:13

Hmm one thing I hope they fix in the PS4, the file systems fine, but it must be overly complicated considering how long it takes to format anything!

ps3ud0 :cool: