'Reformatting' Harddrive

sahun

Reformatting might not be the right word. I have recently purchased an external hard-drive which is in ntfs format, but this doesnt seem to work with xbox or ps3, so Im guessing I need to change it to fat32, however I only want to change some of the hard-drive and not all, which I believe is possible with this one, the Seagate Freeagent.
I want to reformat about 50gb to fat32 so can easily copy video files over and watch them on tv instead of computer. Is this possible?? and how?

aknot

The best bet would be to format the whole drive in fat then partition the drive then to change one partition from fat to ntfs.

have a look at seagate tools for windows as this would allow you to format to fat http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=seatools-win-eula&vgnextoid=d0d51d4dad651110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

Or connect as a slave drive and format as fat within windows, basically there are many options and different ways to do this

sahun

aknot wrote: »

The best bet would be to format the whole drive in fat then partition the drive then to change one partition from fat to ntfs.

I dont have the space to transfer the files I already have on the HDD, so for the moment formatting the wholse drive is out of the question.

Will take a look at the seagate site, thank you

aknot

kltpzyxm wrote: »

Connect the external drive to your pc.
Start Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management
Delete the partition.
Create a the new partitions you want.
Then format them in the format of your choice.
Alternatively use something like Partition Magic to do the job...

HTH

Dont forget that the OP wanted NTFS aswell as FAT


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456984.aspx

HTH

aknot

sahun wrote: »

I dont have the space to transfer the files I already have on the HDD, so for the moment formatting the wholse drive is out of the question.

Will take a look at the seagate site, thank you

If the drive is big enough create another partition so you have 3partitions then you could wipe the older 2 partitions and transfer everything back over or leave it in the 3rd partition.

sahun

kltpzyxm wrote: »

Connect the external drive to your pc.
Start Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management
Delete the partition.
Create a the new partitions you want.
Then format them in the format of your choice.
Alternatively use something like Partition Magic to do the job...

Doing it this way, do I risk losing what is already on the HDD?

aknot

kltpzyxm wrote: »

I didn't forget
Using my method, you can format in both FAT & NTFS

:rotfl: :rotfl:

OP is using Vista, 3rd party tools I find are better

aknot

sahun wrote: »

Doing it this way, do I risk losing what is already on the HDD?

All depends as you can format what partitions you want :beer:

sahun

Im looking to convert some of the space Im not using into fat32

aknot

sahun wrote: »

Im looking to convert some of the space Im not using into fat32

Firstly create a new partition then format that into FAT

sahun

umm how do I create a new partition?

sorry Im new to all this