Wow, another old thread rises from the dead...
Weathers94 wrote:
Hey. I "Deleted Partition" and now my computer wont read my external hard drive or my ps3 can i get so help...
If you deleted the old partition you'll have to create a new one, and then format it. However, if your drive is larger than 32GB then Windows won't offer FAT32 as an option.
So basically the problem is this, if you are trying to format a large external HDD with the FAT32 file system Windows won't allow it. If you google the solution you'll find all kinds of info, and much of it is wrong. Micro$oft imposed an artificial limit of 32GB to try and force people to use their more proprietary NTFS format. This limit is ENTIRELY a Windows restriction. It has nothing to do with the file system itself, as FAT32 actually supports partitions up to 2TB (yes, I said 2 Terrabytes). Anyone who tells you otherwise (like that clown SkiMask above) is just clueless.
Many of the "solutions" you'll find on-line suggest you use Windows Disk Manager, or use the command line. These solutions will likely fail as well with a large HDD.
Most other operating systems, like Linux or MacOS, will happily format any drive up to 2TB with the FAT32 file system. So the answer is to either use another OS, or to use a 3rd party formatting utility for Windows.
One of the more popular utilities that google searches will find is Swissknife, but that utility has gone commercial and is no longer free (also, a LOT of people had trouble with Swissknife crashing). A utility that IS still free is Fat32Formatter, and you can find the Windows GUI version here . Fat32Formatter works well for most people, and the GUI version is very easy to use.
Personally I use and recommend GParted. GParted is an open source (free) disk partitioning utility that comes in the form of a boot disk (or a bootable USB flash drive for netbooks). As a boot disk it is OS independent (should work on any Intel based hardware), and you won't have to worry about OS compatibility or problems from data protection apps. GParted is an all-in-one tool for creating, deleting, resizing and formatting hard disk partitions in a wide variety of file systems. The trade off is a bit more complexity, although it is still quite easy to use.
You can get GParted from Sourceforge here . GParted is included in most Linux distributions, and the main info page is here...
Another popular one is the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, which google will find lots of sources for.
And finally, many hard drive makers have free formating utilities available for their products. For example, Western Digital offers a free FAT32 formatting utility for their external hard drives. Just go to their support site and look at the downloads for your drive model (or if you are really lazy, try this link), and Seagate has its DiskWizard software.
Note that partitioning and formatting a hard drive with most of the utilities above will erase everything on it. So you must backup any important data before proceeding. The exception would be GParted, which has the ability to split a large drive by resizing the existing partition and creating a new one in the unallocated space. Personally I still recommend you backup important data before doing it this way, so it's not much of a time saver, but there may be reasons you'd want to split your drive, which I'll explain below.
One of the big limitations of the FAT32 file system is that it cannot store any single file larger than 4GB. This is why some people opt to split their drives into 2 partitions. You can have a FAT32 partition for use with your PS3 (and your computer will still be able to use it as well) and another partition using a more modern file system that allows larger files (NTFS, Ext4, HFS+). Note that this second, non-FAT32 partition will not be accessible by the PS3.
So there ya have it. Lots of options, lots of links. All in one post. And yes, in case you are wondering, the PS3 can access and use a 2TB external FAT32 HDD (I have tested it).
Everyone thinks I'm psychotic (except my friends deep inside the earth).
