Formatting high capacity disks with FAT32

I primarily use my PS3 as a media player rather than a gaming console. I like games but I hardly ever have time to play them.

I bought it in the US which meant that the console cannot play any non-NTSC or any DVD (including Blu-Ray) not from region 1. I decided to rip and encode all my region 2 DVDs to get them to play on PS3 and I figured I would need a 500 GB disk at the very least to dump all the encoded movies. So, I bought one and copied over some of the files I had already encoded.

But when I plugged it onto PS3's USB port, the hard disk did not show up. After a little bit of troubleshooting, I realized that the disk was formatted as NTFS which PS3 does not recognize. This was a bummer for a couple of reasons:

• I had to now reformat the disk to FAT32 and copy over all the movies once again (did I mention I was lazy? :-) )
  
• I also lose the ability to copy any file more than 4GB (the 32 in FAT32 refers to 32bit which is 2^32 or 4Gb).

Now, if only life were that easy. When I tried to format the disk to FAT32 using Windows XP, I realized there was no option to do so. The only option available was NTFS. After a lot of cursing and yelling at Microsoft and Sony for making me work this hard, I calmed down and started googling for solutions. I came across this support article by Microsoft on FAT32 limitations and why NTFS is better. But the point that got my attention was this:

You cannot format a volume larger than 32 gigabytes (GB) in size using the FAT32 file system during the Windows XP installation process. Windows XP can mount and support FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB by using the Format tool during Setup. If you need to format a volume that is larger than 32 GB, use the NTFS file system to format it. Another option is to start from a Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me) Startup disk and use the Format tool included on the disk.

So, interestingly, it was the format tool in XP that was imposing the 32 GB limit and not the file system itself. Since, I only had an XP machine at my disposal, I did some search and found Ridgecrop's fat32format, a simple to use command line tool that gets the job done.

After downloading, extracting and running it (fat32format x: (where 'x' is the drive to format)), I had a 500 GB FAT32 partition. I had no problems copying the files over and watching them on PS3.

Why didn't I just format the disk to FAT32 on Mac? Well, I didn't have my MacBook Pro handy. Disk Utility would have made the task a cinch.