I am attempting to reformat a 250 GB external hard drive from NTFS to FAT32 which is the only compatible format for my HD Digital Set Top Box. Having been unable to format the drive through Windows I resorted to using the Command Prompt and typed the command: format K: /fs:fat32. It accepted the command and advised that I would lose all data, to which I agreed. It then went through the motions of 2%, 50%, 80% and after reaching 100% completed the following message appeared “The Volume is too big for FAT32”. I also tried the same procedure on a 120GB drive but received the same message. Can you help?

As you have found, Windows XP can be unhelpful when attempting to format a drive as FAT32. In fact, if the drive is not currently FAT32 then the option will not even be presented if you attempt to format the drive through Windows (i.e. by right-clicking on the drive and selecting “Format”). This is presumably because Microsoft is trying to phase out the FAT32 file system in favour of NTFS which is more efficient, particularly for large size hard drives. However, as you have discovered, quite a few devices still only support FAT32 so quite often we need to use this format for compatibility purposes. You have followed the correct procedure by attempting to format the drive as FAT32 through the Command Prompt as that will at least give you the option to use the FAT32 format. That said, even using this method the system may refuse to format the drive due to the large size. In this situation we will need to use a third-party utility to format the drive, as the limitation which Windows imposes regarding the size of drive which can be formatted as FAT32 does not apply to third-party utilities.

A utility that you may wish to consider using is Easeus Partition Master Home Edition (www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm). While I have not used this utility myself other users report that this free utility does a good job of formatting drives of larger sizes into various formats including FAT32. Additionally, the utility also has many other features including the ability to resize existing partitions. However, if you do intend to use the utility for these more advanced purposes you should ensure that you have a full backup of all data on the hard drive being modified before proceeding because if the process goes wrong (for one reason or another) it could result in all data on the drive being lost. As always, you should also ensure that this utility meets your needs, and having not used it myself I cannot provide specifics on the suitability of this utility for your specific case.