Need help formatting hard drive to Fat32

[Havok83]

I have a 500gb external hard drive that I need to format to FAT32. I cant do it in Vista bc its too large. How would I go about doing this?

 

[Fardringle]

The maximum volume/partition size for FAT32 in Windows XP and Vista is 32 GB. (XP and Vista can read larger partitions but cannot create or format them.) If you want the whole drive to be a single partition or just a few large partitions, you'll need to format it as NTFS.

You might be able to get Partition Magic or a similar utility to format the whole drive as a single FAT32 partition, but unless you need to use the drive with an Operating System that can't read NTFS there's no good reason to do that. If you do need it formatted as FAT32 for a non-Windows operating system, you'd be better off formatting the drive from within that OS.

 

[robisbell]

or use a drive overlay to allow FAt32 to use it. buggy but another option.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

This should do the trick

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co....ex.htm?fat32format.htm

 

[redbeard1]

This has been recommended here before and has worked well.

Swissknife

 

[Old Hippie]

Originally posted by: redbeard1
This has been recommended here before and has worked well.

Swissknife

Thanks RB1! :thumbsup:

 

[vpctech]

The maximum volume/partition size for FAT32 in Windows XP and Vista is 32 GB. (XP and Vista can read larger partitions but cannot create or format them.)

wow, I'm very surprised by this. At home I have a win98 pc with a 100gb (single partition) drive and I didn't use a special utility on it. Why the XP/Vista limit I wonder?