FAT 32 partition limited at 32gb?

[alexroy514]

Hi everyone,

A while back, i was helping a friend upgrade his 60 GB PS3 with a new 250 GB hard drive. He had already maxed out his hard drive and he didn't want to lose any data. So we went to the store and bought a 500 GB external drive for the backup (i needed it for my computer).

When we hooked it to the PS3, (Via USB) it didn't recognize, so i figured that we better reformat it. We unplugged it and hooked it up to my vista computer and we tried to format it to FAT 32 all 500 GBs of it. It didn't work, after a Google search we found that the max partition size for a FAT 32 HD format is 32 GB. So we made the partition and did the back up and everything...

My question is : How do people have these huge hard drives formatted in FAT32 if i'm not able to format more than 32 GB of a hard drive to work with the PS3?

[idone]

You can format fat32 up to 2TB, but no higher... windows format options may only allow you to format up to 32gb but if you do some more searching you will find out that that is not the actual addressing limit of fat.

http://www.compuapps.com/Download/swissknife/swissknife.exe is a free app that should do the trick for you, there are also many others out there.


good luck

[jestero]

or maybe your hd was damaged?

[TonyHart]

Well the swissknife didn't help at all. I hacked away at the hard drive and now it BROKEN. Thanks for that.

[beanhead]

Try this tool

I used it on my 320 GB Hard Drive, only took a few seconds.

Hope this helps

J

[idone]

What do you mean you hacked away at it?? with a knife?,..lol

Try this then.. Its command line! all you have to do is enter the drive letter then when prompted type "y"

[Maniac2k]

Microsoft implemented a limitation to FAT32 because they wanted that everybody uses NTFS instead. You can use other Tools or Operating Systems to format your HDD with FAT32 up to 2TB.

[alexroy514]

Thanks for your replies! I understand now... When i get my 1TB Hard Drive i'll be sure to test out your tools idone.

Just one more question... Do you know why Fat 32 has a maximum file size of 4 GB (according to Wikipedia) It sounds like it could be a major inconvenience if the PS3 becomes hacked and we end up dumping Bluray Disks Games on a Hard Drive, don't they have a capacity of 50GB ?

[idone]

Do you know why Fat 32 has a maximum file size of 4 GB

its an addressing limit, and there is no way around it.

[Mantagtj]

I used PARTITION MAGIC and partitioned 500 gig of a 500 gig drive then it will ask what type of format you want which is wicked m8 easy life.

Just windows is crap All the best.