PlayStation 3 Forum

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PS3 cannot recognize external hard drive.

Topic started by Andorski on Nov. 6, 2009. Last post by WilliamRLBaker 2 weeks, 1 day ago.

Post by Andorski (633 posts) See mini bio

434 ACH / 9305 P

I want to use my new 500GB Western Digital hard drive to back up my PS3 so that I can install a new 2.5" SATA drive, but my PS3 doesn't recognize the external hard drive. I read that the PS3 cannot recognize storage devices formatted as NTFS, so I reformatted it to exFAT (the only other format choice Windows Vista gave me). Still, the PS3 won't recognize it.

So what can I do to have this external hard drive be compatible with my PS3?

Posted 2 weeks, 4 days ago

Post by m1k3 (495 posts) See mini bio

577 ACH / 10495 P

Make sure the the external HDD is FAT32 not exFAT

Posted 2 weeks, 4 days ago

Post by DJ_Lae (333 posts) See mini bio

2560 ACH / 46088 P

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It has to be FAT32 - exFAT isn't supported by the PS3. You'll need a third party program to do it in Vista, though, it won't allow you to format FAT32 on its own.

No idea why Sony decided to be backwards and only support FAT32, which is an utterly useless file system for large drives.

Posted 2 weeks, 4 days ago

Post by angelkanarias (929 posts) See mini bio

278 ACH / 2525 P

I don't think it supports exFAT. I think it has to be plain FAT32. Anyways, Fat doesn't support files bigger than 4 gigabytes more or less.

Edited 2 weeks, 4 days ago

Post by Killjoy (257 posts) See mini bio

1855 ACH / 19180 P

@Andorski: I had a similar issue with my hard drive and had to format a couple of partitions into FAT32. If you have difficulty doing so with the default Windows Disk Manager, I recommend some kind of 3rd party utility. Personally, I had to use Partition Manager because Win 7 won't let me make a FAT32 drive bigger than 32 gigs (the real limit is 127 gigs, incase you're a fan of huge partitions).

I hope that helps.

Posted 2 weeks, 1 day ago

Post by Snapstacle (611 posts) See mini bio

283 ACH / 3315 P

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I totally use SwissKnife. Totally.

Posted 2 weeks, 1 day ago

Post by WilliamRLBaker (2,548 posts) See mini bio

1076 ACH / 21021 P

^ killjoy has best answer but just incase you dont wanna use a 3rd party program.

to get access to the disk manager in vista go to your start button, and right click computer click manage in the popup computer management should pop up, under the list of stuff on the right side, storage should have your disk management program, you then should be able to shrink, delete and such the volume and create one with 32 gigs and format it in fat32.

Posted 2 weeks, 1 day ago

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