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Format hard drive with FAT32 in two steps

Posted on One min read

I recently bought a nice-looking external hard drive from Vantec. Since I have both PC and Mac, I need to format the hard drive in FAT32 filesystem and by Windows Vista’s disk management, it doesn’t give you the option to format with FAT32, only in NTFS. That’s no good because Mac cannot write to NTFS, it can only read the filesystem. With some Googling, there is a turnaround to this. The command line is your solution.

  1. Go to ‘run’ from the start button and type ‘cmd’ to bring up the command window.

  2. Type this in the command line: format (Drive letter): /FS:FAT32

That’s all! The format process will take a while, at least it will give you the percent it’s completing at.