That’s not a problem unless the disk that you want to format is larger than 32 Gigabytes. If you open the formatting options in Windows for such a drive, you will notice that only NTFS is selectable from the file system pulldown menu.

That’s because of an artificial limit of 32 Gigabytes. Fat32 is only selectable in the graphical user interface if the disk is not larger than 32 Gigabytes. With today’s hard drives, that’s seldom the case. You could partition the drive first to create a partition of 32 Gigabytes or less, but that could lead to other compatibility issues.

A few solutions are available to format those drives to Fat32. The command line tool format does not have the same restrictions as the gui. Your first option is therefor to format the drive from the command line.

Use the hotkey Windows-r to bring up the run box. Type cmd and hit enter. Now enter the following command to format a selected drive to Fat32. A: refers to the drive letter, make sure you change it to the correct drive. The /q parameter enables quick format, if you like a normal format instead remove it from the command.

format /FS:FAT32 /q A:

Working with the command line may not be to everyone’s liking. If you prefer a graphical user interface you can download the freeware Fat32Formatter which gives you similar options.

The program is portable which means you can run it right after you have unpacked it to a local drive. You select the drive that you want to format from the physical drive pulldown menu at the top. Information get populated automatically by the software on each selection.

All partitions of the drive are displayed, and you need to select the partition that you want to format. This step is mandatory even if there is only one partition. Additional information are displayed after selection, including the used and empty space on the drive.

You can specify a size and volume label for the newly formatted partition. Users who are in a hurry can enable quick format to speed up the formatting. A click on start formats the drive.

Several hard drive manufacturers are offering tools for their hard drives to format hard drives larger than 32 Gigabytes to Fat32. You may want to check their homepages to find those tools. Most free and commercial partitioning tools can do that as well.

The main advantages of exFAT in comparison to FAT32 are the removal of the 4 GB file size limit and support for hard drives with large capacities (recommended maximum sizes for both are 512 TB). The exFAT file system driver will add the option to format removable media with the exFAT file system to take advantage of it. The file system is using a smaller disk space overhead than the NTFS file system. Users reported a disk space overhead of only 96 Kilobytes on a 4 Gigabyte flash drive after formattting it with the exFAT file system. The NTFS file system used more than 47 Megabytes of space for overhead.

Interested users can download the exFAT file system driver update directly from Microsoft to add exFAT file system support to their operating system.

The exFAT file system driver incorporates the following advanced structures to improve performance:

* A cluster bitmap for fast allocation
* A per-file contiguous bit for fast file access
* Better contiguous on-disk layout (useful for recording movies)
* Support for Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) time stamps

The exFAT file system driver is designed for extensibility to enable the file system to keep pace with innovations in storage and changes in usage and to enable OEMs and ISVs to add extensions seamlessly. Specifically, exFAT adds the following features:

* Adds template-based metadata structures to enable custom extensions
* Enables implementations to persist these extensions without having to know their format

The exFAT file system driver adds increased compatibility with flash media. This includes the following capabilities:

* Alignment of file system metadata on optimal write boundaries of the device
* Alignment of the cluster heap on optimal write boundaries of the device

The prerequisites for the update are an installation of Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Service Pack 3.

I had first thought of using the virtual OS of Windows XP on my PC to format these drives via a USB to ATA connector. And this will work. But as I am not going to be doing this on an on-going basis, I figured I’ll look for something that may be used by people without virtual OS software. And I found one at Fat32 Format.

This fat32format.exe program is small enough for me to store it on a web email account to access anytime I want. And it’s fast and simple to use. Just open a DOS CMD window and type "fat32format x:" where x is the drive to be formatted. Just be careful and never ever type c:

The only downside is this does not perform disk integrity checks. You’ll have to do a chkdsk yourself afterwards. Although this does mean it’s lightning fast in formating. And it’ll format up to 2 Terrabytes in FAT32.

This article has been contributed by Dante. Thanks a lot !