Formatting drives with FAT32 – works well with: HotSwap! – hot eject and hot insert SATA hard-drives – practical use with ICY BOX 266StUSD « The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/07
Every once in a while, you want to exchange lots of information with systems that only have FAT32 in common.
Exchanging such large amounts is easiest with an external drive, especially because you should not underrate the bandwidth of your harddrive. Especially if you can connect them with (e)SATA, and HotSwap them. But even USB usually is fast enough to compete with a gigabit network connection.
For that, it would be easy if you could format an external drive with FAT32.
However, the built-in FORMAT (using format /FS:FAT32 X:) barfs if your disk is larger than 32 gigabytes.
Since it is hard to get such small drives anymore, you seem to be stuck.
[Wayback/Archive] fat32format ([Wayback] www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip) comes to the rescue!
It formats any drive, as long as it has a driveletter:
fat32format X:
You can assign driveletters to drives using diskmgmt.msc
There is even a [Wayback/Archive] GUI version!
- x86: [Wayback] www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.exe
- x64: [Wayback] www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat-x64.Exe)!
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
external drive said
yes,it performs,but when i wanna transfer files from mac
to my hardisk it always say “the finder cant complete….” any suggestion what happened ?
jpluimers said
I have no idea. I’ve never seen such a message under Windows or a Mac.
Maybe if you search using the exact message on Google it will give you some results.