How to format 1TB drive to FAT32

Don't sweat the little stuff -- after 7360+ posts, there bound to be a few that have issues with me.
I had bigger dogs nipping at my heals.

With this as his sole post thus far, it's likely one of the few on my ignore list and this was the sole means to spit at me. So what

'Consider the source'

hmm; replying from memory is not reliable

there's an add-on pair that provides that nfts-3g service for 10.4
(and MacFUSE )

OS X 10.5 was suppost to have it all natively

Open a command prompt and type format /fs:fat32 X: Just replace X with your drive letter.. It will ask you for the volume label make sure you type it in exactly..

With a 1TB drive be prepared to leave the computer on for the day.. It will take some time.. Well over 7 hours..

And that's why you use the /q switch to do a quick format, but he didn't want to lose his data.

FAT32 cannot have a file larger than 4GB. If you have 1TB of video files, you'll destined to have one larger than 4GB. FAT32 is a mistake, pure and simple.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic36678.html

Well, I have no problem admitting when I am wrong.. After doing a little more research the dos format command will not format any drive 1tb or larger in fat32.. I have formatted 320gb drives using the same method so I am not sure of the exact cut off point.. I am not sure if I am allowed to post links but there is a free program called fat32formatter by TOKIWA that will format the drive (I just checked it out myself)

so there's a utility to format to fat32 for a western digital media, is there a utility that i can use to format my 1TB Seagate Barracuda? iv'e been trying to format it to fat32 for a while but i was never able to do it

windows does not make this easy. Other platforms (eg Linux) will make it much easier
to achieve

HOWEVER, Fat32 on a 1TB partition is going to make a MASSIVE Clump size and waste megabytes of space.

if you can be sure that only Linux or Windows systems will be used, then just use the
NTFS and life gets much simpler.

The program I mentioned fat32formatter should format any make of drive.. The 1tb drive I formatted using this program in fat32 was using SATA so im not sure if there would be a difference in trying a IDE drive though I doubt it.. They are right though about the cluster size.. Only use fat32 if you must, such has with a gaming console which usually dont support ntfs..

you can try partition magic 9.0, it has the feature to convert fat32 to ntfs or vice versa. it took 30 mins. on my 160gb hardisk.

How massive are we talking? How many megabytes?

i think the you should also try and look for a new firmware for your dvd palyer which MIGHT be able to play stuff off an NTFS drive....cuz a dvd player that cant access NTFS is just stupid cuz FAT32 cant handle files over 4 gb so that means u cant have a backed up DVD on it :S

this is what wikipedia say about fat32
Max file size 4 GB minus 1 byte (or volume size if smaller)

so it cant hold DVD backups or HD movies either

Why would you want to use Fat32 on a 1TB hard drive? There is a long litany of apps you can't put on the HDD because of the limitations of Fat32. I had a 1TB external HDD and the first thing I did was convert it to NTFS before putting anything on it. I wouldn't expect to be able to recover data if I changed the format for any reason.

na teklord, data recovery is easy

Me too!

I was having this same problem!

I bought the Western Digital My Book 1TB and it came as FAT32. My samsung dvd player with USB was reading all the folders etc fine. I backed up the drive and switched it to NTSC and put all the movies/music etc back on there and now the samsung USB couldnt read anything.

Only solution that is suppose to work but doesnt work for me so far as mentioned previous, but updated link:

support.wdc(dot)com/product/download.asp?groupid=115&sid=34&lang=en

I also am getting the error others are getting when using the tool.

Ok my solution (untested with dvd player but it shows the drive as FAT32 now) is download the program mentioned FAT32format here: www(dot)softpedia(dot)com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/FAT32format.shtml


Then extract the zip file to your hard drive which probably is C:

open the start menu in windows, in the search bar, type cmd

which will open a command prompt

Then type C:/fat32format.exe F:


Where F: is the drive letter you want to format. Be sure its the right one cause it will delete everything. It is not converting the file architect it is really formatting it to the new architecture.

I believe caps are necessary for calling the program so if it happens to be FAT32Format.exe when you download it then you have to call it case sensitive. But Im pretty sure they'll keep it all lowercase for ease.

My 1TB western digital my book was empty and formatted in like 10 seconds to FAT32. Awesome!

Worked for me where the Western Digital tool produced an error like others have gotten.

I'm looking to do the same thing.

I've got an external 1 Terabyte with data on it and I want to convert it to NTFS but I'm worried about boundaries and finishing up with 512byte clusters.

So I'm interested in this gparted thing and have downloaded it. But I'm a tad confused. Is it for Windows? Or only for Linux? Or is that you make a CD which is a Linux boot CD but will explore your Windows setup okay?

I'm proceeding on that latter basis but perhaps if I'm going wrong someone will jump in and set me right before I go much further...

and I think if I go ahead and finish up with 512 clusters it is not the end of the world, anyway, they can be changed to larger simply enough, without losing data?

The WD site says:
" The FAT32 formatter software is only for older external single drive units and can only format a drive that is 1TB and below. It will not work on an external drive that is greater than 1TB in size. It also may not work on models released after 2007."
None of this explains why, "it cant be read by my DVD player".
DVD players don't play movies on a hard drive anyway, they only play DVD/CD, so something is missing here.