Format a Seagate External Harddrive

tinofapples

Hi there,
I recently purchased the above with over 700 avi movies on it, my hope was to be able to connect it through my dvd player or Saorview box to play the movies but neither were recognising the drive. I then decided to re-format the drive including wiping the 700 movies so that I could copy all my own avi files onto it and make it useable. However it seems I cannot format as FAT32, anyone any advice on what can/should be done in my situation ?

tinofapples

Anybody please ?

jamesd

What error do you get when you try to format?

Alun

Depending on how big the drive is, Windows will refuse to format it as FAT32 using the standard format context menu, but there are 3rd party utils out there that will do it for you, or else if you feel comfortable with it, open up a command prompt window and use the command line FORMAT command. e.g. FORMAT F: /FS:FAT32 (obviously replace F: with whatever the drive letter is!!)

Be aware though that if you do this, the maximum file size will be 4GB.

tinofapples

jamesd wrote: »

What error do you get when you try to format?

I didn't get any error when I tried to reformat, just the only 2 options of file system was either NTFS which it was originally or exFAT which I choose. It still wasn't being recognised by either dvd or box though.

tinofapples

Alun wrote: »

Depending on how big the drive is, Windows will refuse to format it as FAT32 using the standard format context menu, but there are 3rd party utils out there that will do it for you, or else if you feel comfortable with it, open up a command prompt window and use the command line FORMAT command. e.g. FORMAT F: /FS:FAT32 (obviously replace F: with whatever the drive letter is!!)

Be aware though that if you do this, the maximum file size will be 4GB.

It's a 1.5TB but only showing 1.36 TB, can you recommend a good simple to use ultility to do this ? I would be fine with the command prompt option but the max file size would be no good to me.

Alun

tinofapples wrote: »

It's a 1.5TB but only showing 1.36 TB, can you recommend a good simple to use ultility to do this ? I would be fine with the command prompt option but the max file size would be no good to me.

The 1.5TB vs. 1.36TB is down to different ways of defining what a megabyte/gigabyte/terabyte etc. actually is. Disk manufacturers use 1,000,000 bytes (i.e. powers of 10) as a megabyte, Windows follows the same convention as for internal memory (i.e. powers of 2) and defines it as 1,048,576 (i.e. 1024x1024) bytes. Strictly speaking the standard SI prefixes like mega-, giga-, tera- etc. should only be used for powers of 10, and for powers of 2 you should use mebi-, gibi-, tebi but nobody actually uses these in practice, hence the confusion.

There are some utils out there that do a lot more than just formatting, that might come in handy sometime like Easeus Partition Master (http://www.partition-tool.com/), or try this (http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm) for something that does just the formatting.

tinofapples

Alun wrote: »

The 1.5TB vs. 1.36TB is down to different ways of defining what a megabyte/gigabyte/terabyte etc. actually is. Disk manufacturers use 1,000,000 bytes (i.e. powers of 10) as a megabyte, Windows follows the same convention as for internal memory (i.e. powers of 2) and defines it as 1,048,576 (i.e. 1024x1024) bytes. Strictly speaking the standard SI prefixes like mega-, giga-, tera- etc. should only be used for powers of 10, and for powers of 2 you should use mebi-, gibi-, tebi but nobody actually uses these in practice, hence the confusion.

There are some utils out there that do a lot more than just formatting, that might come in handy sometime like Easeus Partition Master (http://www.partition-tool.com/), or try this (http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm) for something that does just the formatting.

Nice one mate, job done. Next time I see you in the pub you're having a drink on me