Will PS3 reformat my external hdd?

[sniper78]

I have a 400gb external hdd that is fat formatted and works with both my mac and windows. Do you think if i hook this up will it be reformatted or is it ok because i have tons of stuff on there that would be bad if i lost it.

[Elite Jounin]

I have a 400gb external hdd that is fat formatted and works with both my mac and windows. Do you think if i hook this up will it be reformatted or is it ok because i have tons of stuff on there that would be bad if i lost it.

That is a good question, but I also have one for you. Does your ps3 recognize your external HDD? I have a 500GB external HDD and my ps3 does not recognize it at all.

PS. I converted it to NTFS, maybe this could be the problem as well?

[sniper78]

Prolly so it is not reconized with ntfs. Idk i havent even tried hooking it up with the fear of erasing or something. But I'm thinking now if u put a memory stick in thats fat all its stuff comes up. So if it's fat it should alright.

[yman182]

ok so i just tried this and it seems to work. I formatted an external 80gig hd into fat32 and the ps3 detects it just fine...One problem with that though. Windows xp only allows you to format drives under 32gigs into fat32 or it makes you do NTFS. What i did was I made a 30gig partition in computer management and then formatted it into fat32 and it worked like a charm. If you guys and gals have any questions about how to do this feel free to ask or pm me!!

Im sure there is a program that allows you to format more then 32 gigs in windows xp i just havent looked for one. I bet partition magic will do it because in theory fat32 should be able to support upto 2 terabyte hard drives

[MelGibson]

Why do you need a program to format your drive to fat32 under xp anyway if you are using ps3 and linux ?

Just format the drive under linux using fdisk and mkfs (or mkfs.vfat or mkdosfs)

[yman182]

not all of us have a linux computer sitting around at home and some of us wanna backup our ps3 before we format it to install linux on it

[MelGibson]

Hmm.. yeah if you wanna backup your data you have aproblem.. i forgot about that.

What about starting diskmgmt.msc ?

Maybe this is helpful, too

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

[yman182]

disk managment will only let put fat32 on 32gigs or less...that seagate utility might work though havent tried it

[MrBond007]

Norton Partition Magic 8.0 can Convert/Format it to a Fat32 500GB

[sniper78]

i bought my 400gb external hdd and it's formatted to fat32.