Need help FAT32 format?

Question

Hey I just bought a 300gb external hard drive and I want to use it on my laptop and ps3. If it was only for the laptop I'd use NTFS but the PS3 only uses FAT32. I tried SwissKnife and Partition Magic, but they all just fail. I need help... thanks! :)

Answer 1

GParted is a great tool. It's the only one I use for partitioning. It can also reformat a hard drive from NTFS to FAT32, which is what you want.



Here's how:

1. Download the GParted Live CD. See source 1 download link.



2. Burn the GParted .iso as an ISO image to a blank CD. You must burn it to a CD as an image, not as a group of files. If you don't do this, then you won't be able to boot the CD.



Here's a great tutorial on how to burn an ISO image (see source 2). Its intended audience is for people trying to burn an Ubuntu CD, but you can follow the steps to burn any .iso as an image.



3. Once you've burned GParted to the CD, put your CD in the tray and restart your computer. Your computer should boot into your CD, not into your operating system. If it does boot into your OS, then you have to restart and change some settings in the BIOS. See source 3 for a tutorial.



4. You should now be in GParted! The interface is very simple. Select your external drive, then go to Partition > Format to > FAT32. Then, apply the changes and you should be good to go!



Good luck!



------

.: ItsJareds :. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, XML developer

http://wurbo.com/

http://www.spogg.com/

Answer 2

Connect the external to your computer, make sure it is showing up in My Computer, go into Computer Management, select Disk Management and right click your external, select Format and then choose the FAT32 option

Answer 3

More simply, right click on it's icon in My Computer and click 'Format'. Select FAT32 from the list and then click format. Done.