'I have a 250GB external hard drive and I tried to format it into FAT32. But Windows 10 Disk Management tool failed to do this job because the hard disk drive is larger than 32GB. Is there any third-party FAT32 formatter or format tool can help?'
When working from a Windows environment, you may experience difficulty using the default Windows format tool to format your large external hard drive or USB drive as Fat32. It happens because 32GB size limit exists on FAT32 formatting. But don't worry! Here is third-party free FAT32 formatter can help you complete this job with no obstacle.
Actually, there is a long list of FAT32 formatter support to format large hard drives to FAT32 beyond 32GB size limit. But which is the best one? Here we would like to introduce you EaseUS Partition Master Free. we recommend it as the best FAT32 format tool for two reasons. First, it is free, powerful, safe, and easy to use. It can help you format external hard drive, USB flash drive or SD card into FAT32 in just simple steps. And second, it has flexible and advanced format options. If there is data on your hard drive, it allows you to directly convert to FAT32 without formatting. So all your data will keep intact. Now, you can free download this FAT32 formatter and follow the tutorial below step by step to format your device with ease.
Step 1: Launch EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the partition on your external hard drive/USB/SD card which you want to format and choose the 'Format' option.
Step 2: Assign a new partition label, file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3), and cluster size to the selected partition, then click 'OK'.
Step 3: In the Warning window, click 'OK' to continue.
Step 4: Click the 'Execute Operation' button in the top-left corner to review the changes, then click 'Apply' to start formatting your external hard drive/USB/SD card.
Patriot flash drive, a popular storage device, can be used for expending storage ormedia to transfer data between different devices or back up files. And usually we need to formatthe Patriot USB flash drives in the following cases:
Case 1. Before you try to use the flash drive to storedata, you need to first format it to a certain file system.
Case 2. If the flash drive is filled up with old andunnecessary files and leave no space for other important data, you can format itto free up the disk space.
Case 3. When your Patriot flash drive iswrite-protected, then you cannot access and add new files to it. Therefore, youhad better reformat it to remove the write protection for reuse.
Case 4. The current or default file system of your Patriotflash drive is not compatible with computers or not suitable for some largefiles, like videos, you have to format it to a proper file system like NTFS.
Generally speaking, the Windows built-in tools, like Disk Management, Diskpartcommand prompt, are the first choices most computer users will make.
1) Format the flash drive via Disk Management: open DiskManagement by right clicking This PC, and clicking 'Disk Management' under'Storage' Tab ->locate and right click the Patriot flash drive->choose 'Format' from the drop-down menu-> choose your desired filesystem and click OK.
2) Format the flash drive via Diskpart command prompt: open thecommand prompt by typing 'cmd' at the search box, right click the programand select 'Run as Administrator'. Type diskpart and press enter to launchthe program. The input the following commands in turn and press enter after each:list disk-> select disk # (# refers to thenumber of the Patriot flash drive) -> clean-> createpartition primary-> format fs=fat32.
Usually, these two methods work well. But when you want to a flash drive over 32GB toFAT32, you will find that Disk Management won’t offer the FAT32 file system for youto choose during the formatting process. And in the Diskpart, you will get an errormessage reporting: thevolume size is too big.
As talked about above, the Windows built-in formatting tools might fail to format thedrives. Under such situations, you might need a powerful Patriot flash driveformatter- AOMEI Partition Assistant.It is a versatile freeware utility designed for formatting any USB storage deviceslike USB flash drive/stick/pen drive/portable drive, SD card, or other external harddrives into NTFS, exFAT, Ext2/3/4, FAT32 file systems. It supports Windows7/8/8.1/10/XP/Vista on either a 32-bit or 64-bit setup. For Windows Server users,you can try the Server edition.
To format Patriot flash drive successfully using fore-mentioned software, please doas follow (we will take formatting flash drive to FAT32 in Windows 10 as anexample).
Before you start formatting
1) Since formatting will delete all the data on the flash drive, so please copypartition to another disk in order to ensure the data security.
2) Connect the flash drive that you intend to format to the computer, and make surethe computer can detect and display it in its main screen.
3) Download the free flashdrive formatter, install it according to the hints.
Step 1. Run the software, find out the Patriot flash drive andright click it to choose Format Partition from the drop-down menu.
Step 2. In the pop-out mini window, selectFAT32 under File System tab and click OK.
Tips: You can also add a partition label so as to distinguish itfrom other partitions easily when necessary. And you are able to change the Cluster size as you like.
Step 3. Click Apply->Proceed to commit thepending operation.
In this article, we mainly focus on how to format a flash drive to FAT32 via aprofessional Patriot flash drive format tool. Also, you can run it and take samesteps to format flash drive to other file systems. Moreover, AOMEI PartitionAssistant is also able to convertNTFS to FAT32 without losing data, and vice versa. If you upgrade toProfessional edition, you can recover lost partition, convertsystem disk beteween MBR and GPT, extend system partition with ease.