Formatting a large hard disk to FAT32 ? How?!

AirCooledHeaven

Hi

My son's 40GB Playstation3 hard drive is full, so I'm planning to replace it with a 250GB drive I have lying around. First I need to backup the data using the built in backup utility. However the PS3 will only recognise an external storage device formatted as FAT32. I have a portable 320GB drive I was going to use for backing up and restoring, but of course it's formatted NTFS. On my Win XP PC the only format options are NTFS and ExFat. I also believe there's a problem formatting over 32GB with FAT32. So how can I backup a 40GB disk ?

Hope a drive guru can help me out. Thanks

GlasgowTech

In Windows XP, go to > Start > Run. In Windows Vista and Windows 7, go to > Start, type > Run in the search field, and launch it. Type > cmd into the text field and click > OK.

Enter the following command at the prompt: format /FS:FAT32 X:

Replace the letter X with the drive letter for the external device you wish to format and hit > Enter.

GlasgowTech

If you have difficulty that way ^^

Try downloading a program called SwissKnife (Free on Windows XP)

Pretty simple tool. But the Command Prompt is the easiest way in my opinion.

Dale.

Mankysteve

He'll still the 40gb to save game data for. You can't run games off an external drive just be aware of that. you can format the whole drive in fat32 it's just that you can have any files bigger than 4gb

henm2

Can also be formatted using the well known free partition program GParted.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php gives instructions about how to download it on to a usb flash drive.

AirCooledHeaven

Well all was looking good, it was formatting away for a while but then aborted with the message "Volume too large for FAT32"

Any other ideas?

AirCooledHeaven

OK I fixed it using a tiny utility I found called FormatFat32

Thanks for your replies