Solved How to Format 5TB drive to fat 32

I have a new 5TB external hard drive. Is there any way I can convert it to Fat32? Quick format allowed me to convert from NTFS to Ex Fat. I then normally use a little program by Ridgecrop consultants to convert from Ex Fat to Fat 32. But it said the drive is too large for that. Tried doing it in diskpart and that didn't work either.

Hi, what type/model or brand is the drive?

Hazel123 said:

I have a new 5TB external hard drive.

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Hi, what type/model or brand is the drive?

It's a Western Digital 5TB external hard drive

Hazel123 said:

It's a Western Digital 5TB external hard drive

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Thanks.

Try WD Quick Formatter, check the XP Compatibility box, then proceeded with MiniTool Partition Wizard or try your Ridgecrop consultants to format to FAT32.

Hazel123 said:

It's a Western Digital 5TB external hard drive

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I apologise, I was just reading the WD support site and apparently XP Compatible configuration option is not available on Windows 8 and 10. I don’t suppose by any chance you have an old PC with windows 7. I should of researched better first, sorry

From Western Digital FAT32 File System and Partition Size Limits for Windows & macOS

glasskuter said:

From Western Digital FAT32 File System and Partition Size Limits for Windows & macOS

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I had a look at that, but these 2 people successfully converted it to fat32. But obviously, due to the xp option, these guys must of been using windows 7? The thread is from 2021.

Result one

Result two

Needing a win 7 workhorse and would win 11 recognise such a formatted drive would be the defining factors.

split it into 3 partitions.

In this guide, i will show you how to format USB drives larger than 32GB with FAT32 on Windows operating systems.

FreeBooter said:

In this guide, i will show you how to format USB drives larger than 32GB with FAT32 on Windows operating systems.

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Have you tried it with anything larger than 3tb?
I’ve read in a few places that Fat32 should be compatible with drives upto 16tb. But nowhere have I seen anyone say how. So it’s confusing.

antspants said:

Have you tried it with anything larger than 3tb?
I’ve read in a few places that Fat32 should be compatible with drives upto 16tb. But nowhere have I seen anyone say how. So it’s confusing.

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No i have not i don't have drive that size, did you?

FreeBooter said:

No i have not i don't have drive that size, did you?

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Nope, im very curious to find out. My CCTV uses drives with Fat32 formatting And I’d also like to know if it is possible to upgrade without purchasing a new sustem

Sorry for not replying earlier. I had a tedious day reinstalling which was why I had wanted to format the drive and save a load of files separately from an image. But used another drive and will read through properly to see what the solution is - thanks for the links which seem to explain how to do it.

It’s not my main laptop and I’ve had the odd glitch for a while ever since trying to install some codecs but it had a black screen last night. Turns out it’s an HP thing and holding the power button for 10 seconds sorted it. Also the charger has been intermittent recently. After getting the screen on I did sfc/scannow and it fixed some corrupted files but decided to reinstall from an earlier image anyway.

And now the charging is working ok again. So what seemed like two hardware issues were actually software.

Also had s few issues with EaseUS today. It makes images easily but wasn’t so great at reinstalling an image. It kept failing with an error. Third time it worked and no idea why as didn’t do anything different.

I then made a couple more images after reinstalling - one with just programmes and one with programs and files. And the second one overwrote the first one! Is it supposed to do that?

That was really annoying. But luckily I had done both images With a different back up program as well so didn’t lose the image that just had programs on.

When Ease US saves an image it just calls it Disk 0. Second image on the external drive was called Disk 0 (1). So I assumed the next image would be called Disk 0 (2) - but it just overwrote Disk 0 (1) - thereby losing the earlier image.

Anyone know if you can rename EaseUS images? Or do they have to be in a particular format naming wise?

Probabaly best to look at the instructions on their site. You might have created a new base image by mistake.

And the other tedious thing after reinstalling was Firefox password manager lost passwords from the last month. Had to reset quite a few. Thankfully had a Google one written down because resetting a Google password without the password can lock you out. Never had this with Firefox sync before.

Hazel123 said:

Never had this with Firefox sync before.

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I also use FF Sync across 3 systems and find it a little problematic recently. It took a fresh install of FF as the current state and wound back my other two systems. I can say I was quite peeved off.

Hazel123 said:

I have a new 5TB external hard drive. Is there any way I can convert it to Fat32?

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Hazel,

One limitation to consider:

The one I remember most is that FAT32 does not support file sizes greater than 4 GB. This is why my UFDs for deploying Windows are NTFS because my windows images are greater than 4GB.

Check out this post for more details if interested...

glasskuter said:

From Western Digital FAT32 File System and Partition Size Limits for Windows & macOS

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Thanks. I only had one file size greater than 4gb (a video). This is purely for file back ups. I use NTFS for the system images but wanted a large drive to back up a lot of files, photos and videos. I could just leave it as ex fat I guess. But it seems there are solutions above.

antspants said:

I also use FF Sync across 3 systems and find it a little problematic recently. It took a fresh install of FF as the current state and wound back my other two systems. I can say I was quite peeved off.

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Yes I am not impressed at all. I have it across two systems and it's always been reliable. Both computers have been on recently as well. All the new passwords were done on the computer I reinstalled on, but should have been registered and synched to the other computer anyway. It's pretty outrageous losing a bunch of logins and passwords!

I'm wondering exactly how it works now. Are they actually stored anywhere?

Edit - I know it's an issue with AVG and another antivirus (Avast?) but I don't use either of those.