Formatting External Drives With FAT32 in Windows Vista
November 12th, 2008
I’ve just lived through possibly one of the most frustrating computer disk formatting experiences of my life. Turns out nowadays it’s not as straight-forward as possible getting an external drive as compatible as possible with multiple operating systems.
I just bought a 1TG external drive. I needed it to be readable by Mac and PC systems. Seems like the drive only accepted exFAT of NTSC as formatting options. I wasn’t sure what exFAT was or if it was a Windows Vista thing.
It is a Windows Vista thing, presumably introduced in Vista SP1. Thus begins my 48 hours of formatting hell…
I even tried to format the drive using my Windows XP machine. Also no luck. Mac offered its own methods which also weren’t compatible with PC afterwards.
I Googled some more and discovered people in the same predicament; looking for an option to bypass the absurd 32 Gig formatting limit–which is absolutely untrue and only a Windows-imposed limit based on their own reality–I’ve been running two FAT32 external drives for 2 years now, a 60 Gig and a 250 Gig. I have never had issues, and obviously by my example (and many others online), this is left to The Landscape of Windows Absurdities.
I did discover one option that I got to work from within WIndows Vista. There are a few third party options but none were open to full usage (being demos or limited Shareware).
The option I used was a freeware program called Fat32Formatter… NOT Fat32Format… I had NO idea how to get that damn thing to work… it’s “Fat32Formatter!” Here’s a screenshot:
From what I understand this is also good advice for XBox and PS3 users who purchase larger drives. I have neither and can’t confirm this.
Instead of taking 10 hours to format UNsuccessfully using two other options–one of them a convoluted Command Prompt option, run with elevated status, done in Windows Vista–EPIC FAIL–this little application did it in THREE seconds.
If all goes well for you too you can flip two birds at Microsoft once again in my name. Thank you, and Your Welcome.
NOTE: Because this was so difficult to find, I’ll keep a copy of the file here (RAR): Download Fat32Formatter.rar
Original Image (Flickr CC-By): CarbonNYC
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Finding the right format can be a huge nuisance, I solved it by using a two-pronged attack:
I formatted all my disks with EXT2 and have no trouble accessing them from Mac or Linux, for Windows, I use FS Driver and it works just as well.
The second prong involves my old (seemingly dead) laptop, which is running CentOS and a Samba server, which shows up as a shared disk in my network places.