if you guys want to format your large hd to fat32 for recording on some fta pvr's (viewsat 9000hd) for one, you will need to do this, because windows will not let you do it but only to ntfs.

Click Start menu, select Run and enter diskmgmt.msc

If it asks you to initialize the disk, make sure you select a Basic disk, as opposed to a Dynamic.

You need to find the disk with unallocated space. Right click on it and select "New Partition" and follow these steps, clicking "Next" to get move on at each stage.
Partition Wizard starts, just click next to move on
Select Primary Partition.
Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
Choose assign a drive letter. I used F:
Select "Do not Format this partition"
There will be a dialog box, summarising all the previous stuff. Click Finish
Now you have a drive letter, this is what we will pass to the formatter

Now download a copy of fat32format. (attatched) Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:\. Click Start->Run and enter cmd. CD to the where you extracted the fat32format exe, e.g. by typing CD /D c:\

Now you're almost done.

Type this

fat32format f:

You should see this displayed

Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)

Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before.


Assuming you don't bail out at this point you should see something like this -

Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure
(y/n) :y
Size : 250GB 488392002 sectors
512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size 32768 bytes
Volume ID is 1bdb:2c1d
32 Reserved Sectors, 59604 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats
7629261 Total clusters
7629260 Free Clusters
Formatting drive f:...
Clearing out 119304 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster...
Wrote 61083648 bytes in 0.988463 seconds, 61796609.106193 bytes/sec
Initialising reserved sectors and FATs...
Done

This means that all has gone according to plan. It should take about 4 seconds per Terabyte to format the disk. You can run chkdsk f: at this point if you're curious, and see something like this -

The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume Serial Number is 1BDB-2C1D
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
244,136,352 KB total disk space.
244,136,320 KB are available.

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
7,629,261 total allocation units on disk.
7,629,260 allocation units available on disk.

This shows that my calculations match up with the ones inside Windows, which is good news.