How to get PS3 to recognize External HDD?

R

Ron FTL

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 17, 2008
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I have an 300gb External HDD on my PC in which I store all my Television shows movies and music.
I would like to hook this up to my PS3 so I can play all my HiDef content and funny tv shows through my television.

My external HDD is currently in NTFS format.
From what I understand Gaming consoles cannot read NTFS drives. They only read FAT based drives.
I backed up all my data on my PC and attempted to format my drive.

Upon reading it looks like the PS3 only currently reads FAT32. Which has a max single file limit of 4gb.

Now my PC is currently running on Windows Vista x64 SP1.
When formatting the drive I only can format to NTFS or exFAT.
I was unfamiliar with exFAT so I tried it out, but my PS3 does not recognize the drive.

So, I am kinda stuck right now.
Is there a way to force FAT32 file system to my drive through windows Vista?
(maybe in command prompt?)

if not.
What is a solution to properly format my HDD to be read by my PS3?
 
Hmm I am pretty sure I formatted one of my external drives in Vista 64 and the PS3 sees it fine, but there is a chance I formatted it with Acronis Disk Director Suite and not the windows format tool.

But if you have one of the linux live boot discs you should be able to format the drive to fat32 with that.
 
I have a WD5000AAKS in a USB external box formatted via Vista64 hooked up to my PS3 working just fine.
 
Ok. Just to be 100% clear here.

I should not have to make any main directory for my PS3 to recognize the files right?

Just drop the music, video, and image files into the blank drive, correct?
 
Oh praise the LORD!

Finally I got this damn thing figured out.
I found a program called Swiss Knife V3 which allowed me to format any drive up to 2TB in FAT32.

I formatted my 300gb Seagate ST3320820A with it and my PS3 reads all 300gb perfectly.
This seriously took me hours and hours of searching. I downloaded about 4 or 5 different programs which all failed.
I'm so happy now! :D
 
Thanks, just googled this after getting a 320 GB Western Digital Passport Elite. I'm splitting it into 2 160 GB partitions and wanted to have one FAT32 to hook up to my PS3, but could only pick exFAT or NTFS in Vista Ultimate. Googled for playstation 3 exfat to see if there was any support for that (didn't think there would be) and came across this link to the [H] not too far down. Didn't even have to get to the next step of trying to figure out how to format FAT32 in Vista on a large volume. Hopefully mentioning the search terms will help it move up the page....and help someone else. Downloading the SwissKnife v3 now to format this drive.
 
No luck with SwissKnife in Vista Ultimate 64-bit w/SP1. Crashes upon startup :( Looks like I'll need to find another utility.

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: SWISNIFE.EXE
Application Version: 3.0.22.0
Application Timestamp: 438ed075
Fault Module Name: PartUtil.dll
Fault Module Version: 3.0.14.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 438ecd4e
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00032a68
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: fd00
Additional Information 2: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160
Additional Information 3: fd00
Additional Information 4: ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160
 
I ended up using a command line utility named H2format to format my external drive as FAT32. The windows built in format utility seems to still have a limitation less than 160 GB as it says my drive is too big, but not until after spending hours pretending to format it. I suspect the artificial 32 GB limit is still in place for FAT32 on the vista command line format executable. H2format runs in a couple seconds so it must not do any disk verification or checking. It might be wise to run a chkdsk or something similar after formatting your disk using this utility, but it seems to work in Windows Vista x64. Remember to open your command prompt as administrator or it will error.
 
StormUP said:
I ended up using a command line utility named H2format to format my external drive as FAT32. The windows built in format utility seems to still have a limitation less than 160 GB as it says my drive is too big, but not until after spending hours pretending to format it. I suspect the artificial 32 GB limit is still in place for FAT32 on the vista command line format executable. H2format runs in a couple seconds so it must not do any disk verification or checking. It might be wise to run a chkdsk or something similar after formatting your disk using this utility, but it seems to work in Windows Vista x64. Remember to open your command prompt as administrator or it will error.
Click to expand...
That is correct. Since Windows XP, Microsoft has capped FAT32 partition creation at 32GB. MS still allows XP / Vista / 2003 / 2008 to read and work with FAT32 partitions up to the file system's technical limits. However, MS maintains that NTFS is a better choice for volumes larger than 32GB, due to its more efficient space utilization, better resistance to corruption, support for larger files, etc.

A Linux Live CD is my favorite tool for working around this limitation.
 
I think the 32 GB limitation for the Windows format.exe started with windows 2000. Using Linux to format was going to be my next step, but I don't keep live CD's on hand and my Linux server hasn't been updated in a while/is headless/is a pain to get at in the closet/really hasn't seen much use lately, etc., etc.
Linux for formatting is a good suggestion though as it makes partitioning and formatting quite easy as well.
 
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