Comments on: How To Format A Large Hard Drive With Either FAT Or FAT32

By: Large Pot

Large Pot — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 07:12:55 +0000

I’ll post the same information to my blog, thanks for ideas and great article.

By: Duckeenie

Duckeenie — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 03:39:00 +0000

One thing you need to remember about FAT/32 is that the File Allocation Table which needs to be loaded into memory grows exponentially with the partition size. May or may not be an issue for you depending on your system spec.

By: Tina

Tina — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:54:00 +0000

You provide sound reasons why NTFS is to be preferred over FAT32 under normal circumstances.

However, if you read the other comments you will understand that there are situations in which FAT32 is required! Although Linux and Mac OSX can work with NTFS, there is hardware, such as DVD/Bluetooth devices or game consoles, that can work with external storage media, but only if it is formatted with FAT32. And for those people wanting to connect a large hard drive to one of these devices, this article will be extremely valuable.

By: Tina

Tina — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:54:33 +0000

You provide sound reasons why NTFS is to be preferred over FAT32 under normal circumstances.

However, if you read the other comments you will understand that there are situations in which FAT32 is required! Although Linux and Mac OSX can work with NTFS, there is hardware, such as DVD/Bluetooth devices or game consoles, that can work with external storage media, but only if it is formatted with FAT32. And for those people wanting to connect a large hard drive to one of these devices, this article will be extremely valuable.

By: Guest

Guest — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:30:00 +0000

You can’t have any single file larger than 4gb in size with Fat32. Now that’s a major limitation! Fat32 is less secure, that’s another reason NTFS was created. There are small addon programs for MAC OSX to enable read/write to to ntfs drives for free. There is also a program from Paragon that allows windows to see Mac drives and read/write to it. Newest versions of Linux can read/write to both windows and Mac drives. Fat32 should be left to flash drives.

By: Bmulligan69

Bmulligan69 — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:13:00 +0000

I just upgraded a PS3 with a larger HDD and it will only recognize a FAT32 HDD. In fact, to backup the OEM harddrive using the system’s backup utility to an external drive, you need a FAT32 usb drive for that too.

By: Tina

Tina — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:55:00 +0000

Great input! Thanks for pointing out the /Q quick format option lf0!

By: Aaron McFarland

Aaron McFarland — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:17:00 +0000

This is another tool that allowed me to format an external drive to FAT32 and worked very well ‘Easeus Partition Master Home Edition 7.0.1′ and is a completely free tool.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:33:00 +0000

It is true that Windows won’t mark “weak” sectors, however this is not guaranteed using any other “proper” software for the job either.
I haven’t used them in a while but SeaTools used to have problem with those sectors too. If the sector was found weak and the data couldn’t be read (and relocated) it would be marked as pending until [any] data was written to it again.

I would rather use Check Disk than some third party software simply because in addition to mark bad sectors it is able to detect File System errors. Unless the tool is able to do that it would just relocated the same bad data.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 10:33:44 +0000

It is true that Windows won't mark "weak" sectors, however this is not guaranteed using any other "proper" software for the job either.
I haven't used them in a while but SeaTools used to have problem with those sectors too. If the sector was found weak and the data couldn't be read (and relocated) it would be marked as pending until [any] data was written to it again.

I would rather use Check Disk than some third party software simply because in addition to mark bad sectors it is able to detect File System errors. Unless the tool is able to do that it would just relocated the same bad data.

By: lf0

lf0 — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 08:36:00 +0000

All drives nowadays come pre-formatted. The only reason to re-format is because you want to have another file-system.
Using the format tool to determine whether the drive has bad sector or not is very unreliable (it does not even check if the written sectors can be read and also only writes zero-bytes). If you are in doubt your drive is still OK you should really use the manufacturers test tools. Those work much more reliable and are also able to properly mark the sectors as bad.

By: lf0

lf0 — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 07:36:23 +0000

By: Aibek

Aibek — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 05:14:00 +0000

thanks for the input

By: Aibek

Aibek — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 05:12:00 +0000

good point

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 01:56:00 +0000

Unless you have used the drive before and know it is good, you really shouldn’t use the /Q option. Doing a quick format on a brand new drive is asking for trouble because it doesn’t actually verify that all the sectors can be written to. Yes, formatting a 1 TB drive can take a while, but it’s less time than doing a quick format and having to recover your lost data when you find out the drive is bad.