Fat32

[ilovehr]

I've just bought an external HDD for storing my music collection in lossless format for playing through my new amp.

The drive is an Iomega 1TB drive which by default is NTFS formatted.

My amp will only read disks formatted in FAT16 or FAT 32. Can anyone recommend some (preferably free) software that will allow me to format the drive in FAT32? I'm running Vista 64bit on my home PC and this wont give me the option to format a USB drive in anything other than NTFS.

 

[darmstadt]

Boot your system using a Linux Live CD and you should be able to do it from the command line.

 

[Pondlife]

Iomega provide a utility to format back to FAT32. Probably on the drive itself or on CD if shipped with one.

Have a looky here

 

[Toad]

HP USB disk storage tool....

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197

 

[VectraMan]

Before you start resorting to Linux, downloading extra tools etc., why not do it in Windows?

 

[TheFaQQer]

Before you start resorting to Linux, downloading extra tools etc., why not do it in Windows?

As the original post said

I'm running Vista 64bit on my home PC and this wont give me the option to format a USB drive in anything other than NTFS.

Not sure if that's right or if ilovehr is missing a trick, but how do you format it to FAT32 on Vista 64bit?

 

[bellymonster]

Use the FORMAT command from a cmd window.

FORMAT X: /FS:FAT32 /Q

Where X: is your drive letter of the hd you want to format.

 

[VectraMan]

As the original post said


Not sure if that's right or if ilovehr is missing a trick, but how do you format it to FAT32 on Vista 64bit?

Apologies if that's true, but Windows 7 x64 will let you do it so I'd be suprised.

 

[ilovehr]

Thanks for the feedback. I actually used swissknife in the end. It took about 5 hours but has done the trick.

In answer to the suggestions to use windows:

Windows will only alllow you to format a drive in FAT32 if it is a local drive (presumably one that is attached to the pc via SATA or IDE) and won't allow you to do it to a drive that is connected via USB. I tried to use windoze a couple of times and couldn't get my head around why it wouldn't work.

The FAT32 formatter that Iomega supply is not compatible with 64bit windows so that wouldn't work either.

Anyway, all done now and I can get around to ripping about 300 CDs......

Thanks for the help.

 

[VectraMan]

I think there's a size limit. In Windows 7 x64 I can format a 14GB partition on an external USB drive as FAT32, but for the 100GB partition on the same drive it only gives me the option of NTFS or exFAT (whatever that is).