Hi, this is Scott with Gadget Experts. I'm going to show you how to format an external hard drive today.
I explained that I was going to show people how to do an external hard drive, how to format it because there are people out there that are upgrading their Play Station 3 gaming systems and they're having trouble formatting or learning how to format the external hard drive to back up their files on their Play Station 3 system. So today, I'm going to show you how to do it. It’s very easy and very simple.
First, what you're going to do is go up to my computer. I am using Windows XP. When you go up to that icon, right click it and then you're going to go down to manage and you're going to want to click manage. I've already opened it. It sort of comes up here. Now this is the screen that will come up, go down to disk management, click on disk management. I'm going to make this bigger so that we can see here. Okay, the first partition that you see up here is for your computer because we have not formatted the external hard drive yet. So if you have not plugged in your external hard drive, do that right now. And then what you’ll see is like disk one. It’s the second one on the list. It will be black like it is on my screen, and you're going to want to right click that. You're going to want to go down to new partition. You can click next; these are the screens that come up.
Now, you can do a primary partition or an extended partition. Today I'm going to use the primary partition; it really does not matter. If you want three primary partitions in that, you can create up to four primary partitions or three primary partitions and an extended partition. You can read all that right here, under the description. Anyway, click next. Now here it says maximum disk space in megabytes and that’s what you have, like your partition for the external hard drive for a FAT32 is you can go up to 32 gigabyte. So if you're going to go ahead and do that, you're going to have to create a few partitions if your file systems that you’re backing up are a lot larger than 32 gigabyte.
I'm going to leave mine like this. I'm going to format it; this is for my mother I'm just going to format it down right, so I'm going to click next. It says assign the following letter. You can assign a letter; you don’t have to assign a letter. I like to then this way when I plug it in, then I can save things to that drive letter. You can also mount it in an empty folder if it’s an empty FS; you can. A FAT32, you cannot. Anyway, click next. Then the next screen is to choose whether you want to format this partition and if so, what setting would you want to use? This is where if you did the 32 gigabyte where it says file system, you could click on that and it will have NTFS or FAT32. This is where you're going to want to click on FAT32. But I didn’t make mine 32 gigabyte partition. I made it the whole drive so it’s not on my list. But for you Play Station 3 people that want to back up your files, it has to be FAT32, okay? Go back in the steps and do it properly.
Now, the unit size, I'm going to leave it at default. I don’t want to mess with that. Volume label, this is where you make the label of it, so when you plug it in and it comes up, this is what it says. This is my mom’s so I'm going to put mom’s drive. It doesn’t give you a lot of character space. I think there is like a few more character space, but there is not any more character spaces.
Now, what you can do is click on perform a quick format and for this partition, I'm going to enable file and folder compression. So we can get more files and folders and stuff on here and I'm going to click next. Okay, it says the label contains characters that are not valid because I put a comma. There, I fixed that, next. And then this gives you all the settings that you have selected in everything and then you click finish. And what it’s going to do now is it’s going to format the drive.
Now, it’s already finished. It’s already formatted my drive because I did quick format. If you don’t click quick format, it takes a long time but if you want to totally wipe out that hard drive, I would just—I would suggest not doing the quick the format. I would just do the longer one which can take, you know, depending on the size of your external hard drive a few minutes to maybe an hour. So anyway, after that’s complete, you're good to go. You can unplug your external hard drive from your computer, take it over to your PS 3 and start backing up your files.
If you need more than 32 gigabytes, I would consider doing more partitions for that, probably the extended partitions for that and you will be able to back up your entire PS 3 files, which I have done. It’s very simple, it’s very easy. I had trouble learning about how to do this, creating a partition and turning it into a FAT32 file system just to back up my Play Station 3 system. And now that I know how to do it, I wanted to share my experience with you. I hope that this video helps you in creating your FAT32 file system or formatting your external hard drive. So anyway this is Scott from Gadget Experts, thanks for watching. Please comment and rate, thank you very much.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services