Formatting a laptop hard drive (PS3 drive) to FAT32

Question

My PS3 broke down and i am trying to fix it, hopefully this can be done by formatting and reinstalling the OS on its HDD.

The HDD is a standard laptop 2.5" drive.

I have tried swapping it with my laptop's HDD, running the Windows 7 install DVD and running a bunch of commands from a command line:

diskpart list

select disk 0

create partition primary

format E: /FS:FAT32

This fails with an error that the volume is too large (120GB) to be formatted with FAT32.

How can i format this drive to FAT32? (PS3 forums suggest this is the right way in order to properly restore the OS later on).

Note that i don't have access to an actual machine running operating system UI (since i have room for only 1 drive in the laptop).

Answer 1

Try adding the flag /A:8192 to the format line, to increase the allocation unit size

Formatting FAT32 partition on 500GB HDD

If that doesn't work, I'd recommend getting hold of, or creating, a live USB bootable version of some flavour of linux, and formatting the drive with that `mkfs -t vfat /dev/hda1'

Answer 2

Format it as NTFS first, then reformat it with fat32format - the second formatting is VERY fast, and the first format is primarily so that the drive will get a letter - if there's a drive letter already you can skip this step

Windows XP and newer does not support formatting drives larger than 32 gb by design so a third party tool is needed to do this