FAT32 Problem

Hi Guys,

I am about to rip the rest of my hair out trying to find a solution to this issue, basically for months now I have been using a 16GB USB Thumb Drive to copy movies off my PC onto this device, and then plug it into my XBOX 360s to watch movies via the XBOX, however, it means I have to plug and unplug the device too often to watch newer movies, and for some odd reason it takes forever to copy onto this 16GB USB thumb drive device, I get, at best, 4MB a sec, on a good day, so you can imagine how long it takes to copy just one movie to it that's 1.4GB in size...

So I went out and bought myself a brand new Western Digital Elements 1TB hard drive and filled it up with a heap of my movies, hwoever, plugging it into the xbox proved fruitless, as it wont even see it, then I was informed that the XBOX cannot read or see NTFS drives, so I tried formatting this 1TB USB drive, however, it only has options for NTFS file system or exnts or something, no FAT32... So I went to western digitals site to see if I could find a fix or solution their, however no real luck, they do have a fat32 formatter thingy majigi, but when I try using it, it crashes during install of the software, I am thinking its because of Windows 8 Pro that I am now using, so I hooked it up to a Windows 7 Ultimate machine, again same issue, but the software does say for windows 2000 and XP only.. So I was wandering if their is any other formatting tools out their that can make it possible to get my 1TB external hard drive to format in FAT32 so my XBOX360 picks it up as a portable device and I can then watch movies directly from it, like I do with the 16GB USB thumb drive?

Kindest Regards,

David Giles
NT, Australia

 

I'm hoping someone with more experience with XBox will give some suggestions.

I'm just going to let you know their are some restrictions on the FAT32 file system. A FAT32 partition is limited to 32gb and maximum size for a single file is 4gb. Your movies seem to be below the 4gb limit but your drive size is way too big for FAT32.

I'm not a fan of external HD so I don't have experience with them but maybe you could use a partitioning software like Easeus to partition your external with a 32gb FAT32 partition at the beginning of the HD and then a large NTFS partition for the rest of the space(shrink the NTFS partition from the left, leaving <32gb unallocated space at the beginning of the drive and then format that space to FAT32). See if the drive is recognized by the XBox and it can access the FAT32 partition and play movies from it.

On another note have you tried your 16gb flash attached to a rear USB port--sometimes they are less troublesome than front ports as to being recognized at full data transfer speeds.