I was trying to backup some videos on my Sony PS3 the other day so I grabbed one of my old 80 GB hard drives.  Of course the Sony PS3 didn’t recognize the NTFS file system, it needs to be FAT32.  Simple enough, I thought, I’ll just backup the old files and format the drive as FAT32.

If you right click on the drive you and click Format there are two options

• NTFS
• exFat

But there was no FAT32 option.

This was a job for Disk Manager not the simple format tool.   Click Start and search for “Computer Management”.  Then select the Device Manager.

Click on the drive you want to format and delete the old Volume. Make sure you have selected the correct drive.

Right-click on the disk to create a new volume.   This will take you through a wizard that will allow you to select FAT32 to format the drive.  The volume must be less than or equal to 32,768 MB.

Once I formatted the drive FAT32 the Sony PS3 recognized the device an I could backup the files.

If you want to get around the 32 GB limitation you could format the drive using Linux or a Linux Live CD like Knoppix.

Troy