Formatting a hard drive

deadanonymau5

So I got a new hard drive and need it to be formatted to

Format:MSDOS FAT32
Scheme: Master Boot Record

but when I try format it says

Erase process failed. The disk is too large to be supported by the given partition scheme. Operation failed

I need it to be this format only as it works for me on all my other hard drives and other formats including exfat, give me other issues which Id rather not get into.


Any ideas how to format it?

Type 17

How big is the new drive? - the Max partition size for FAT32 drives is 8TB, but some systems (not sure about MacOS) have limitations on how big a partition they can format, and how big a drive size they can mount (eg:Win 2000 can only format up to 32GB partitions, although Win 98 can manage up to 128GB)

Have you tried partitioning it into two drives? (even if two half-the-size drives won't suit your needs, at least you can do it to prove that the formatting function will work).

deadanonymau5

Type 17 wrote: »

How big is the new drive? - the Max partition size for FAT32 drives is 8TB, but some systems (not sure about MacOS) have limitations on how big a partition they can format, and how big a drive size they can mount (eg:Win 2000 can only format up to 32GB partitions, although Win 98 can manage up to 128GB)

Have you tried partitioning it into two drives? (even if two half-the-size drives won't suit your needs, at least you can do it to prove that the formatting function will work).

Its a 3TB external desktop hard drive. I didnt try partitioning it into 2 drives.

Ive the same hard drive set up the way I want this one to be and it works perfectly but for some reason this new one wont format for me

deadanonymau5

I can format it to FAT32 but it says that 2.2TB is taken when theres nothing on the hard drive

Anyone able to help?

Maximum size for FAT32 is 2TB (if the disk presents a 512 byte sector size which is virtually everything at the moment). Use exFAT if you need it to be cross-platform.