Portable Hard Drive Help

swood

swood

New Member
Can someone give me some steps on formatting an external hard drive in FAT32? It's a 1TB MyPassport external hard drive. I need to find somewhere to transfer all the current data first, but i need to do this asap.

Thank you
swood
 
Hello swood...

I'm just pulling this from my mind since I'm on the go and decided to check in on the Forum. This is what I have in mind: your external hard drive should appear in the "My Computer" or "Computer" window (whichever Windows OS you may be running).

Right-clicking on that hard drive, you should be able to format it from there, and be able to select what type of format that you want (NTFS, FAT32). At least I think that's how you can do it. Hope it works. Good luck!
 
I'm using Vista and i've tried that but it only shows exFAT as an option. Also what allocation size do i choose?
 
I've never messed with allocation sizes, and just left that setting at it's default on the list. I'm pulling this idea out of thin air, but I wonder if there are any freeware programs available on the Internet that allows you to format a disk as FAT32...
 
Are you planning to format the entire drive as FAT32? If so the allocation size should be the same (or at least close) to the entire drive storage space in megabytes (approx 1,048,576mb). In disk management, you should be able to format the external drive connected. If I remember correctly you can format to FAT 32 there.

EDIT: Here is a good way to command line format into the FAT 32 filesystem.
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/formatting-external-hard-drive-to-fat-32/
 
Thanks for the help guys

Yeah i'd like to format the entire hard drive.
I downloaded partition master. Which cluster size should i select:
3509ahx.jpg
 
Last edited:
swood said:
Thanks for the help guys

Yeah i'd like to format the entire hard drive.
I downloaded partition master. Which cluster size should i select:
[imghttp://i51.tinypic.com/3509ahx.jpghttp://i51.tinypic.com/3509ahx.jpg[/img]
Click to expand...

Your missing a bracket for your image. I don't change cluster size and go from there.
 
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