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What can cause Windows 7 to prevent me from formatting 500 GB (actually 465 GB) external USB disk as FAT32? No matter, what I did (Windows Explorer, Disk Management), the only options I was presented were: exFAT and NTFS. Why? 465 GB is far lower than FAT32 partition size limit, right?

I had to install and use 3rd party program. And using it there was absolutely no problems (no errors, no objections) in finishing this task. Formatting it as 465 GB FAT32 disk took less than 30 seconds.

What am I missing here? Why Windows 7 prevented me to format this disk as FAT32 using native system tools?

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    Microsoft doesn't want you to use FAT32 on USB hard drives any longer and for that reason they no longer offer FAT32 above a certain size aimed at usb sticks. So you need to (and still can) use third party tools.
    – 576i
    Aug 2, 2015 at 19:30
  • You won't have been able to format drives larger than 32GB as fat32 since WinXP I believe.
    – Mokubai
    Aug 2, 2015 at 21:40

1 Answer 1

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Windows cannot format drives & partitions larger than 32GB in FAT32

This is one the limitations of FAT32 file system. Also refer to FAT32 in Windows 7

There are third party tools around which makes it possible though

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    It would be better to link to windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/… which at least referes to Windows 7. Your link is for Windows NT/Windows 2000...
    – DavidPostill
    Aug 2, 2015 at 20:48
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    it is not a limitation per-se of the FAT32 file system. FAT32 can have 2²⁸ clusters at 32k, which is 8TB. But 2²⁸ clusters means the FAT itself is 1GB in size (×2 because there are always two FATS), which means to find a free space to store a file the file system driver always has to scan through an entire GB of data... very slow and inconvenient. NTFS uses one 64th of the space to achieve the same.
    – Ro-ee
    Sep 5, 2017 at 23:54

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