I have a spare 250 gig sata drive and I bought an external storage case for it with internal sata & external sata and usb connector types, hoping to use it as a nice big storage drive for movies/music to use thru my ps3 in the livingroom.

I use nero to convert my dvds over to an mp4 that ps3 seems to play great, but I am limited to what I can fit on my 4gb thumbdrive, I know there is a limit of 4 gb files, so i keep each movie at max at 3.9gb in the options menu.

I mounted the drive in that external case today and plugged into the computer (to dump stuff onto it for the ps3) but noticed the drive is in ntfs format (ps3 needs fat32 format), so I went into disc management (using xp pro), but saw no options to change format type to fat 32, tried deleting and reformatting but again only ntfs option shown in that process...

My ps3 needs to have the drive associated to fat32 format, is there a way for me to change over this 250 gig ntfs drive into fat 32?

I remember a long time ago I had a 120 gig drive I put in and thru disc mangement reformatted and did as fat 32, but is it a size thing - 250 gig cant be made into fat32, or is it a sata thing since its a sata drive it cant be converted to fat32?

I just don't know the laws and limits or ins and outs, but if I can get this working 250 gig of storage for music and movies for the ps3 will be SO sweet!

Thanks for any help,

Bill

FAT 32 is limited to 32GB.

You can do what you propose but you need to format multiple partitions @ 32GB.

Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP

As far as a free format tool GParted works very well:

GParted -- Welcome

Thanks for the answer, man that will be a pain to do like 7 partitions then create the file structure in each one, (then also trying to figure out which part has which movie or music, ugh, could do music a-h music i-s music t-z movies 1, movies 2 movies 3 sorta thing i guess...

Can i just create 32gb partitions in disc manager thru xp vs trying to figure out that other program?

Ughh I tried in disc manager to create multiple 32gb partitions, i was able to make 4 primarys, or 3 primary and 1 extended but still had about 100gb that once I created 4 i couldn't seem to get to allow me to create edit or do anything with...

In hindsight re-reading my link that 32GB limit was during an install of XP.

Apparently XP can handle larger FAT32 volumes post install.

Anyway you can try Disk Management but if that fails I would again suggest GParted as it is a very nice free tool.

By trial and error see what Disk Management will allow you. I'd suggest first try and half the drive size and if that doesn't work keep progressively smaller till you find a size that will format FAT32.

I tried as a primary (only one partition - deleted all previous ones) to make it anything above 32gb and the option of fat 32 is gone in the steps portion of making it, if i go 32gb or smaller as primary it gives me fat32 option, so just funky, i remember that one drive I had was like 120 gig and i did that in fat32 no problem (all one drive) so this is weird...

I will try to monkey with that other program you mentioned, just didn't want to mess something else up with a program i am not familiar with.

GParted is very simple and prompts often to ensure you make no mistakes.

What you need to do is create the Boot CD off the ISO download.

If you are unfamiliar with creating ISO CD's please ask for details.

No prob on making a bootable iso (nero fan here) so ill give it a shot here, think ill just unplug a few of these extra drives i have on the pc to reduce the choice of which drive it is that is connected beyond my primary and secondary data drives C and D etc.

Will see tho what options it gives me on this, don't mind having to chop it up a bit but like to at least be able to use all of the available drive, disc manager was only letting me go to 4 partitions @ max size of 32gb as explained above.

Cool.

Let us know how it goes.

It seems to me that part of your reasoning for buying a larger drive is so that you can have larger files, right? A least that is the part of what I took from your original question. However note this from that article.

You cannot create a file larger than (2^32)-1 bytes (this is one byte less than 4 GB) on a FAT32 partition.

Now Windows might not let you do what your are wanting however like jephree said can be done. My 250 gb external drive came as fat32 and I think my dad's 750 gb came as fat32 but I'm not sure on that. NTFS is a proprietary file system primarily used by MS because they own it however it is better than FAT32. With a larder volume size on a FAT32 volume things can get messier. That is the simplest way to put it. Also the cluster size increases & that can lead to wasted space especially with lots of small files because only 1 file can go in cluster. If you have a 64 kb cluster size and for example you have a file (or a remaining peace of a file) that is 16 kb you are losing 48 kb on just that one cluster. In addition you have that file size limit regardless of the cluster or volume size. Perhaps the PS3 has a better file system that it can use although you won't be able to use it on windows.