FAT 32 formatting for external hard drives under Windows

By Jacques Bron on Wednesday, July 30 2008

This post is a follow-up of my previous one concerning the FAT 32 formatting of hard drives bigger than 32 GB under Windows.

For those who think I'm speaking hebrew here, let me explain briefly :

FAT 32 is a common formatting standard for hard drives partitions, USB flash drives and other devices. FAT 32 was first used with Windows 95. Nowadays, it has been replaced by more efficient formatting techniques like NTFS. ThePinnacle Video Transfer I wrote about in my previous post needs external drives formatted in either FAT32 or FAT 16 (which is an even older standard). The problem with FAT 32 is that Windows 2000 / XP / Vista cannot natively format FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB. Windows can read a FAT 32 partition bigger than 32 GB, but it can't format it .

With today's hard drives having sizes of 200 GB or more, that means you would have to create sevreal 32 GB partitions on your drive with drive letters e:, f: g: h:, etc.This is a bad option, very uneasy to manage. There are some commercial disk utiliies that can do the job of creating one large FAT32 partition on a big hard disk, but they do many other (useful) tasks and this is not what I was looking for.After a short research, I found a simple and free utility named FAT32Format, which can format your brand new e-SATA 1000 GB drive in seconds. Using FAT32Format is very easy, but before using it, you need to delete any existing partition on it. Then you need to re-create a partition in order to let Windows assign a drive letter to your disk. This can be done with Windows disk management utilitydiskmgmt.msc (Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc) . However, you should answer "no" to the formatting option of the wizard that helps you create your new partition. The complete procedure is well explained onFAT32Format creator's website.

I hope this information will be useful if you ever need to partition a large disk in FAT32 under Windows XP / Vista.

P.S.: FAT 32 partitions cannot (theorically) be larger than 8 TB (8000 GB). This might be a limitation in a few years from now, with 1 TB drives beeing common these days.