OMG, I just had to write and thank you for this. Soooooooooo much easier than any other stupid suggestions on web ( third party downloads, linux, etc. ). All I wanted was ext hard drive for PS3, and now I have it. Thanx again !

Hey, i tried your method but it said “Access denied as you do not have sufficient privileges. You have to invoke this utility running in elevated mode.”

What does this mean?

Daniel, oh your user name may not be running in administrator mode. You need to be in one.

John, oh strange, hmm. Not exactly sure why. It worked ok on mine.

I needed to format my hard drive to FAT32 so it could be read by my DVD player (USB input). This worked a treat!!! Thanks so much for the advice.

Daniel, if you haven’t managed yet, to do it, instead of clicking on cmd as usual, right click and choose run as administrator, if you’re not already logged on as such, you will need to type in the password for an admin account. (vista)

Lloyd, also doing this for ps3, add me if ya want. psn: danrox48

@John

I got “volume is too big for FAT32″ as well. I did some research and was able to find the following info. from wikipedia…hopefully it helps:

“Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size, but the format program included in Windows 2000 and higher can only create FAT32 file systems of 32 GiB or less. This limitation is by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.[11][15] This limitation can be bypassed by using third-party formatting utilities.”

Thanks, great new DOS command I was not aware of. I too was unable to format an external drive to fat32 using basic windows right click format option, would only offer NTFS. This did go slowly but at least it worked. Now finally able to drop movies from DVR to external drive.

Thanks again!

Thank you

it was good

never mind figure out!!! i was not putting space after word format

so command is like this

format F:/FS:FAT32

thanks all its working now

sorry..forgot to add link where I downloaded..

http://www.mympxplayer.org/tool-fat32format-tue-oct-10-2006-153-pm-df366.html
just download file in C drive and use at C:\> (thru cmd from run)

C:\>fat32format H:
(assumed h drive is your destination drive need to format by FAT32 system)

It sais enter current volume label for Drive. What do I put?

Sorry, I misread your quetion

fat32format just flashed the HD and it converted from the filesys to FAT32. Amazing.

when i type in the commd; format F:/FS:FAT32 and enter it will then come up with this question ” enter current volume label for drive F:

what should i do then?

wari

HAHA, Agreed, this was the simplest and easiest way to do it, every other post on the web tries to reinvent formatting like it’s some fucking mystery thanks!

For those encountering the “Volume is too Big for FAT32″ when executing the run line command. Is the partition you are trying to format still RAW? (Meening you have deleted the existing partition, created a new volume, but did not format) If so I am getting the same error. To fix, just format in NTFS as Vista suggests then re-run the command line Format X: /FS:FAT32 and it will say ” The type of file system is NTFS. The new file system is FAT32.
Enter the Current volume label for drive X: (Here you just look up the volume label by either viewing properties for the drive/partition in your computer or by using Drive Management from management console)” It will then ask you to enter Y and you should be good to go. Let me know if this approach to your “Drive is too big for FAT32″ helps.

Wish I had found this site first. Just spent several hours formatting my new 1Tb Maxtor external hd, only to receive the “volume too big for Fat32″ message. I, too, tried Swissknife which other sites rave about but it didn’t work for me. Would only see half of the hard drive and reflect 500 gb instead of the 1tb. The fat32format utility worked great. Formatted my hard drive to Fat32 in about 15 sec. This would have saved me a ton of time…but oh well, at least it’s done. Thanks to all who posted here..great discussion and thanks Scott for letting us all know about Fat32Format.

Okay, I’ve tried a few variations of this Command version of formatting but every time I do it asks me to enter the current volume label of the drive, and though I try entering whatever values are total, used or free, it will not accept it and will not format it. It reads:

The type of the file system is NTFS.
The new file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive (drive letter):

Now, the first part of the code that I need to enter type from is , not Documents and Settings\Administrator. Might that be the issue? If it is then how do I change that?

Thanks man! Awesome bit of info…

if you put the /Q switch in the command, it’ll do a quick format.. not even close to secure, but if you’re just looking for a quick file system switch, it works great!