Practically, anyone that installs this app to his/her PC will be able to use it efficiently if the PC HDD falls among the ones cited above. Interestingly, the app also recognizes IDE, SCSI, and SATA HDD types. Unfortunately, this utility won’t work for other types of drives ignore this app if you have other drives rather than WD disks/drives. This action will also restore the default icon files of your WD disks. It is an app to use in formatting WireFire hard disk drives or Western Digital USB drives and make them return to the default factory settings. This process will take some time to complete, of course, so you might want to pop a cold one while you wait.The use of this software program is limited to specific actions on specific drives. Also, since FAT32 Format does not perform disk integrity checks on any newly formatted FAT32 spaces, it is advised to run the command “chkdsk /R x:” after the format, replacing “x:” with the appropriate drive letter in question. Figure A This is the GUI version of the fat32format tool.įAT32 Format does require administrator privileges in order to mess around with any of your drives. Just download this utility, run it, pick a drive or partition you wish to format, and presto! There isn’t much else to it. On first glance, FAT32 Format (the GUI version of the fat32format tool shown in Figure A) looks very similar to the normal format tool built into Windows. The only solution that I have been able to find for this 32GB limit problem is a utility called FAT32 Format by Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd. But within Windows, using the basic storage tools to resize operations is not supported on file systems other than NTFS. You may even consider making a partition sized at 32GB initially and then resizing it to fill the rest of the empty space. Unfortunately, when the user wants to prepare a drive for use in this fashion, there is one major problem: Windows cannot format drives and partitions larger than 32GB in FAT32. Beyond 32GBĭespite FAT32’s shortcomings in terms of maximum file size limits, lack of ACLs, and disk quotas support, it’s good enough for basic sneaker-net type activities between operating systems. However, should you trust a third-party tool with your data if you were unsure about it? And even if you were okay with such additional software, this won’t exactly save you should you take your drive on the go and plug it into a shared machine without administrative privileges and aforementioned drivers. For instance, a drive formatted as NTFS for Windows is not write-capable on Mac OS X without some additional third-party drivers. The unfortunate reality we all face is that, due to odd licensing arrangements and a thing I like to call “OS Nationalism,” most file systems tend to be built only for the operating system they were intended to run with and have either limited or no support on competing platforms. Despite how far we have come in the evolution of file systems, such as NTFS, ext4, and HFS+, one thing’s for certain, nothing seems to beat the old-school FAT32 file system for high interoperability between major operating systems with read-and-write capability (and a master file allocation table that doesn’t trash itself as easily as the newer exFAT can). With the help of a special utility application, you can indeed format a FAT32 drive beyond the 32GB size limit.
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