Freeware to Format Large Drive to FAT32

Does anyone know of any good freeware that will help me format a 120GB drive in FAT32? I will be using this external drive to swap files between my laptop and daughter's Mac.

 

Well you should be able to format it to FAT32 from inside windows.

but if you don't want to do that, ther is a few good partition tools on the UBCD...
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Just download it and burn it as an ISO and boot from it, then find the HDD tools section and look for partitioning tools.

 

This one has been around for a long time and apparently is still in development so it must be OK. (last update Feb. this year http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/FAT32format.shtml)

Or developer's site, it is a weird page you click the picture to download the program.

@Q, MS only supports FAT partitions of 32gb, so a third-party utility is necessary.

 

Sorry to drag the thread off topic...

But, sach, is this an absolute with all windows?

As even though i can't recall a single time, i'm almost positive i've managed FAT partitions bigger than 32gb in windows.

 

Q, you are right! I am wrong about that 32GB. Now, that I think about it I have seen people that say they have very large partitions formatted in FAT32. I think that limitation was for the XP install disk not creating a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

I had that limit in my head and misread the pages I was reading when looking for that program. Sorry, for spreading my misconception. :-o

flankadank, if you are running XP or above you should be able to format the drive using disk management.

 

I tried formatting in Disk management, but the only options are NTFS and exFAT. I tried formatting using a command prompt and it looked like it was formatting, got to 100 per cent, then said the volume was too large to format. I'm running XP. I will try one of the utilities you mentioned. Would prefer to avoid a boot disk if possible.

 

And thank you, BTW : )

 

ExFAT is the new improved version of FAT according to Wiki it is FAT64.

It doesn't look like Mac initialized supportro exFAT until two weeks ago so that won't work for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

In one of the pages I was reading it said a Win98 format command would format large drives but finding a bootable CD with the command is the problem. I think XP until SP2 was released supported FAT32 as a format option in Disk Management.

That FormatFAT program has been around for a few years so I think it should be reliable.

 

Sach2, I would like to give you an extra special thanks. I downloaded the fat32format program. Was a little tricky using it as the download site didn't have instructions and none were included in the zip file. However, some of the users who had rated it provided instructions.

I was amazed at how fast if formatted, about 2 or 3 seconds, I thought something had gone wrong. I went into Disk Management and the drive appeared as FAT32. I then tested it by pulling a file from my daughter's Mac and then plugging the drive into my laptop. Worked like a charm.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

 

Happy Thanksgiving to you as well!

I'm glad it worked for you (and that you read the comments :-o).

Sorry, I didn't see that the Softpedia link was to the command-line interface. A bit confusing/useless if you don't run it from the cmd window. The other link was to the Windows graphic user interface version. Still not all that intuitive but going with defaults is at least an option in that one. I only experimented with the program a year or two ago but it seemed to do the job with no problems.

 

I guess i messed up my link in the original post. Here is the correct link to Fat32format developer's site. You have to click here in the sentence, "Try it here", to get to the Windows GUI. Then click the picture to download the program. Weird website layout but it is a decent program from what I have seen. I guess the guy is too geeky to worry about what average users are expecting.

 

I've used SwissKnife to format a 500GB drive FAT32.
http://majorgeeks.com/SwissKnife_d1608.html

 

Thanks again to all of my wonderful fellow geeks. I can always count on someone from this site helping out.