After years of using “fat32format.exe” on Windows XP, which no longer works on Vista, whenever I have the need to format a large drive (>32GB) as FAT32 I have simply plugged it into my Mac in the office and formatted it there, since Windows doesn’t show an option for FAT32 format for drives over 32GB.
It turns out you can force a FAT32 format with the built in format command line utility. First, if the drive is already formatted with NTFS, give it a volume name. Or, go into disk manager and delete the partition and create a new simple partition, and do not format it. For this example I have a 120GB drive on E:, formatted as NTFS.
format /fs:fat32 /a:32k e:
This will prompt you if you want to proceed with the format, and if the partition is already formatted, it will ask you to type in the volume name to proceed. That’s it, all set. The /a:32k is the cluster size and /fs:fat32 sets the filesystem. For some reason you can’t combine these with the /Q (quick) flag, which would be nice.
You probably either need to have UAE off like I do 90% of the time, or run in an elevated command window.
Formatting FAT32 partitions > 32GB on Windows Vista
Did you see the post at http://www.sarcasm.com
If you have Vista there is a quick way to get an Admin cmd prompt. Click the Start button… Enter cmd in the search section but press Ctrl+Shift+Enter, instead of clicking, you’ll get a privilege escalation dialog click OK and you end up with an Admin command prompt, helpfully labeled as Administrator: C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe
This is the best way to run fat32format. It’s always been Admin only, it’s just that on XP most power users ran with Admin rights all the time.
I just used it myself and it works fine.
[mostly quoted from the website. http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
i just spent like 2 hours formating to fat32 and at the end there was a line:
“The volume is to big for fat32.” and it was 119G…