Allocating over 32GB to FAT32 patition

The 32GB limitation on FAT32 partitions doesn't allow you to be able to install very many games onto the hard drive. Thankfully there is a way around this.

First you will need to download Fat32Formatter which is provided at the bottom.

Open FAT32Formatter, be sure to run Admin rights.

Pick your portable hard drive that you would like to make FAT32 with over the 32GB limit. My portable hard drive is a Sea Gate so obviously that's what I'm choosing.


After that you can choose the allocation size you would like FAT32 partition to be, remember that 1024MB is equivalent to 1GB. I already made my partition of 97GB as you can see. There is no limit to the size of partition you can make FAT32 (in reasonable standards).


After you format the desired partition to FAT32 you can start ripping/moving games to the partition. Its worth noting that this will not get rid of the 4GB limit restriction that FAT32 format has.

Max Volume Size:
2 TB
8 TB (with 32KB clusters)
16 TB (with 64KB clusters, not widely supported)

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table)

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Another free alternative for the cmd console users:
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip

How to use:
1) Make partition in diskpart (or Disk Manager if you prefer)
2) Format it as NTFS, or don't format it at all, doesn't matter.
3) Assign it a drive letter (can be done either way)
4) fat32format E (where E is the drive letter you just assigned)
5) Verify your drive letter is correct before pressing y to confirm format.

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Word of note:

The Windows 2000/XP installation program and filesystem creation tool imposes a limitation of 32 GiB. However, both systems can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size. This limitation is by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.

This is true, and can be witnessed by formating a large volume with a small cluster size. For example, formatting 60gb with 512 byte clusters induces a horrible lag (tested with VHD Disk Image). Larger cluster sizes are faster (both read and write), but waste more space (For example, with 64k clusters, a 1k txt file will occupy 64k of space)

The XBox 360 DOES support 64k clusters.
The PS3 also does support 64k clusters.