How to format a External Drive to Fat32

Following on from BHM's excellent tutorial How to optimize usb external h drive with ntfs/fat32 I thought I would add this tutorial as well since I had an external hard drive lying about.

The reason for me needing to format my external HD to fat32 is that the PS3 is available with several different hard drive sizes,but you may want or need a bigger one. You can replace the internal hard drive using a standard laptop hard drive, but this tends to be expensive. An easier and cheaper method is to add an external hard drive to your PS3.The PS3's HD is formated as fat32,and to play video,listen to music or look at pictures from an external HD.
Which must be of a compatible format to work alongside the PS3.The only slight issue with formating to fat32,is that fat32 can only cope with files of up to 4GB in size,so for larger files you will need to split them to ensure that the quality is maintained.

Originally I was going to use SwissKnife as BHM had mentioned,but something / or I went wrong and was having problems,and deiced to go the HD's manufactures website Seagate , and found that they had a great wee tool called DiscWizard download

So this tutorial will help out anyone with a Seagate HD.Although it might be possible to use the DiscWizard with other types of HD it would be best to refer to your own HD manufacture if using another type of HD.

Once you have downloaded and installed the DiscWizard,just follow theses steps,

On the opening screen choose Disc utilities




Then add new disc






Ensure you choose the correct disc by checking the information on screen and follow the instructions



While doing this you might need to delete old partitions on the HD





This screen will default to NTFS. Select FAT32 if that is your choice.




Select Primary partition as they are best for storage that has one partition and uses a single drive letter.



Now check and confirm the choices and details are correct



Now enter a name for your drive



Check and confirm your choices again or you can start from the beginning again,after this step there is no going back





and off we go



Success



To check all has gone well,go into My Computer and highlight your external HD



right click and go to properties,all well you will see this.Drive has new name you put in,and is now correctly formated to fat32.



Next create 4 new folders on the HD Video/Music/Games/Picture ,the PS3 will recognize these folders and allow you access to them.Now just drag and drop your media into the correct folder and connect to you PS3 and away you go.

An additional point to take into mind is the types of video files you can play on your PS3.
Below I have listed the types of media that you can play.

Memory Stick Video Format
- MPEG-4 SP (AAC LC)
- H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile ?AAC LC?
- MPEG-2 TS?H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, AAC LC?

MP4 file format
- H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile (AAC LC)
-MPEG-1 (MPEG Audio Layer 2)
-MPEG-2 PS (MPEG2 Audio Layer 2, AAC LC, AC3(Dolby Digital), LPCM)
-MPEG-2 TS?MPEG2 Audio Layer 2, AC3?Dolby Digital?, AAC LC?
-MPEG-2 TS?H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, AAC LC?

AVI
- Motion JPEG (Linear PCM)
- Motion JPEG (?-Law)

AVCHD ?.m2ts / .mts?

DivX

WMV
- VC-1?WMA Standard V2

For any other file type you will need to convert them to one of the above.

(I am in the process of converting MKV files to AVI,and will post a tutorial in the forum soon,and link it to this post)

Hey thanks for that Reno,I was originally going to use that but decider to go for Xilisoft MKV Converter,bad mistake! got one dodgy version every thing came out with no sound,next one said it was registared but only converted 3 mins of the films,so going to go with mkv2vob now,