I purchased a WD 1tb external hard drive for use with my WD HD Media Player. I’ve been using a 250gb hard drive to watch movies on it without issue.
At first the drive worked fine. Yesterday, I tried to use it on my PS3, which has always recognized the 250gb hd, and it wouldn’t recognize it. I read that PS3 only recognized Fat32, and since the hard drive is NTFS by default, I formated it. There was no setting to format to Fat32, only exFat, so that’s what I formatted it to. Now the computer recognizes it, and its contents, but neither the WD HD Media Player, nor the PS3 recognize it. What’s the problem?
Ok. My problem is that when I go to reformat, the only options are ex fat, and ntfs. I don’t know what the deal is. I’m using Windows 7 64 bit, if that makes a difference.
I think you’re missing the point. The PS3 only recognizes fat32. but there is no fat 32 option to format on windows 7 64 bit. But I shouldn’t have to pick, because my old (2 years) 250 gig hd from WD handled both with no problems. Did WD change their hard drive at some point to cause a problem? ex fat is not some mystical thing. It’s fairly well known. someone has to know something about it.
The Wiki article on exFAT says that it’s mostly just for flash drives… pretty much only works with newest Win versions and newest Mac OSx versions – won’t work with most other devices that support USB drives.
I have no clue why Windoze wants to use it to format your drive… all my WD externals can only be formatted from Disk Management as either NTFS or exFAT as well – could be because they’re connected USB? I don’t know.
Ok, so since I’m not incredibly high tech, let me ask it this way:
Is there anyway to format the 1tb drive so it can be used on the WD HD Media Player, and the PS3? I recognize Windows won’t let me do Fat32 in chunks larger than 32gigs, which is useless to me, and apparently neither machine will recognize esFat. So it appears I need a third party program which will allow Fat32 on a Windows 7 64 bit machine, which will hopefully allow me to use the same hard drive on both machines, in much the same way I’m able to use my 250gb WD hard drive on both with zero issues.
Thanks for your help. I found a working 3rd party application that formatted it to Fat32, so it works without issue on the PS3. I finally got it to work on the WD HD Media player too, but only after unplugging the Media Player, and waiting literally 10 minutes. Now it works, but it’s slow. I wonder why?
