Reformating to fat32

I purchased a 1TB My Passport Essential to use as a backup device for my Playstation 3. The only Fat 32 available from the WDtools is what is refered to as ex-Fat32 which my Playstation refuses to recognize. I have also tried  Seatools for Windows as well as AShampoo HDdcontrol2. After formatting to Fat32 with either of these they are both recognized by my Windows7 64bit Home Premium as being NTFS and my Playstation refuses to recognize it. This drive was purchased new and has never been used for any other purpose. Any one care to offer a suggestion? Buying yet another drive is out of the question as I’m 64 and living on a tiny fixed income. I contacted the Sony PS3 help site and they essentially told me to go pee up a rope. I shudder to think about losing 160 GB of game info. Thank you in advance.

Yeah, unfortunately, we don’t have any software for formatting 1TB in FAT32.  You’re better off Googling FAT32 formatting software, and see if you can find something free or cheap.

I even tried it with a 500GB drive I overwrote and had no luck. This 32 GB limit (or whatever it is) just doesn’t make the cut. **bleep**,I can’t even get a decent  sized drive to implant into the console. An XBox is looking better all the time. 

Many other software’s available to format the drive

You can use Swiss Knife or  this http://www.partition-tool.com/

Hi

Has anyone had any luck with this?

I’ve used partition Manager to format the HDD in FAT32 (in windows 7), and tried placing just a file and files in folders on there but the PS3 won’t recognise the drive at all.

Has anyone got any clue why?

I’ve read a few things about USB3 and buying a USB hubb to fix it, but i dont want to spend £ unless this is confirmed.

in another thread there was mention f lugging the chord in to the PS3 first then into the HDD slowly which helped a few people…

Okay, the good news: I have had success with getting a drive formatted to FAT32 and getting the PS3 to recognize it.

The bad news: getting a big enough drive to format to FAT32 to be able to back-up all the memory I have on my PS3. I really wish Sony would stop the stupidity and just go to NTFS format. I guess they are afraid people will copy their drive to a friends drive to work around having to actually play the game to get all the goodies finishing it gives you. (I’m not refering to any game in paticular here, just in general) That’s really stupid and is a dis-service to their customers. Of course we both know they’ll never do it. At least let us break the backups down to smaller partitions. Why do I need more than 170 GB’s to back-up a 120 GB drive?  

how did you get the P3 to recognise the HDD? 

I’ve got the 1TB elements bought from amazon recently - is it to do with USB 3?

runninron69 wrote:

Okay, the good news: I have had success with getting a drive formatted to FAT32 and getting the PS3 to recognize it.

The bad news: getting a big enough drive to format to FAT32 to be able to back-up all the memory I have on my PS3. I really wish Sony would stop the stupidity and just go to NTFS format. I guess they are afraid people will copy their drive to a friends drive to work around having to actually play the game to get all the goodies finishing it gives you. (I’m not refering to any game in paticular here, just in general) That’s really stupid and is a dis-service to their customers. Of course we both know they’ll never do it. At least let us break the backups down to smaller partitions. Why do I need more than 170 GB’s to back-up a 120 GB drive?  

No,I don’t think it has anything to do with USB 3 because this problem existed before there was a USB3. Besides my mobo isn’t USB 3 compatible. It has to do with the size of the fat32 partition. You can’t make a fat32 partition over 64 GB* ( I think, maybe 128) and if you have more data than that on your PS3 HDD you can’t back it up because the PS3 requires you to put all the data into a single file or partition. Either way you’re screwed. Ain’t life fun?

 *Not with Windows as you operating system anyway. I’m too much of a newbee to understand how to set up my computer to have two OS’S on it. Like say Windows and  Linux,. I don’t know what can be acheived with anything before Vista either. I might try putting my copy of XP onto my externasl drive, boot from that and then see if I can make a 1TB partion in Fat 32.  Listen 'I’m 64 years old, Iv’e been up since 6am CST Sunday. It is now 4:41 AM Monday, my brain is about 10 minutes for BSD,I gotta get horizontal quick. Please let me know if you figure anything out. The site will ping me if anyone replies to this post . :confounded:

You can run any number of Linux “Live” distros…

As long as you can boot from something like a USB or DVD-ROM, you can make a bootable media and boot into a Linux distro directly, and perhaps format the disk from there.

For example, the Fedora distro:    http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

  – has instructions for booting from a USB stick or CD/DVD ROM

Same with Ubuntu:   http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Neither image will do anything to your existing OS, so long as you don’t actually try to INSTALL the live media.