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formatting an external hard drive to work on a ps3


Egg Shen

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anyone done this?

 

i got a new hard drive but it needs to be formatted to work with my ps3, ive looked into a little online but there seems to be so many different ways of doing it. anyone help? got an easy way of doing it?

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Download this free program called Swissknife - Here

 

Firstly your hard-drive will have everything erased when you do this so have anything saved on there that you want to keep copied onto your PC.

 

Follow all the instructions when installing, once its done just connect your hard-drive to your PC and select the hard-drive on the Swissknife program. Convert it to FAT32, it should take seconds and then you free to start putting stuff on there that will work both on PC & PS3.

 

Make sure that if you want to view videos/look at pictures/listen to music off of it on your PS3, on the main folder of the hard-drive you have to create new individual folders named "PHOTO", "MUSIC", "VIDEO" and "GAME" - without the " " obviously. The PS3 will not detect your hard drive unless you do this.

 

Then just put any videos into the video folder and so on, then you're sorted.

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Download this free program called Swissknife - Here

 

Firstly your hard-drive will have everything erased when you do this so have anything saved on there that you want to keep copied onto your PC.

 

Follow all the instructions when installing, once its done just connect your hard-drive to your PC and select the hard-drive on the Swissknife program. Convert it to FAT32, it should take seconds and then you free to start putting stuff on there that will work both on PC & PS3.

 

Make sure that if you want to view videos/look at pictures/listen to music off of it on your PS3, on the main folder of the hard-drive you have to create new individual folders named "PHOTO", "MUSIC", "VIDEO" and "GAME" - without the " " obviously. The PS3 will not detect your hard drive unless you do this.

 

Then just put any videos into the video folder and so on, then you're sorted.

 

cool man, ill try that now.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Any additional help? I think i've just fucked the drive completely. I used swissknife, and loaded a youtube vid to help me with the step by step process (yeah, some of us are computer stupid). I did what it asked, deleted whatever it was that was asked to, made sure it was then in FAT32 to 'create' but it would only come up as read/write error or something along those lines. But underneath it said it had been created and that I could exit. I did this, put one file onto the hard drive to test to see if it had worked on the PS3, couldn't find it. Plugged it back into my laptop and now even that's not picking it up. Have I just wrescked the drive, if not any help? Please.

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i didn't use Swisknife in the end, i used another process i found whilst looking for the Swisnife thing.

 

I'll find out what it was, can't rmemeber off the top of my head. My drive's working fine now.

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To update, I've now managed to convert 429Gb to a FAT32 format but the other 502Gb seems to be dead. The 429Gb has saved itself as SWISNIFE1 (F:) whereas the other 502Gb has saved itself purely as Local Disc (H:). But i'm not allowed access to that (H:) file to do anything with it. It's just there, I can't do anything with it. :( I really wish I knew a little bit more about computers.

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Slightly related -- I've got a new 500GB external hard drive that I'm wanting to use with both PC and Mac. I'm assuming it comes formatted as NTFS, but I want to partition it to half NTFS, half FAT32. What's the best way of doing this? I've been Googling it for the last half hour, and found nothing definitive.

 

I don't want to make the whole drive FAT32 because of the file size limit.

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Slightly related -- I've got a new 500GB external hard drive that I'm wanting to use with both PC and Mac. I'm assuming it comes formatted as NTFS, but I want to partition it to half NTFS, half FAT32. What's the best way of doing this? I've been Googling it for the last half hour, and found nothing definitive.

 

I don't want to make the whole drive FAT32 because of the file size limit.

 

You'd have too make two partitions and format one to FAT32 and the other to NTFS, which you seem to already know, not sure of a free alternative but I have done this in the past using "EASEUS Partition Master" and "Partition Magic".

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having problems too!

 

ive got a 1TB Harddrive and ive been slowly moving stuff over onto it, ive filled 148gig with random video stuff...and now, it's saying it's full!

 

where's my other 800 gig gone? what the fuck? im looking all over google but cant find anything to help.

 

when i right lcick on the drive it 931gig is being used, but when i look into the folder only 148gig is there to see, what's using the rest??

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another thing, would the fact that ive converted it to fat32 prevent me from using the whole drive? or doesn't it make a differece?

 

i know im restricted from putting files on there over 4gig in size, but that aint a problem.

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I'm not sure about PCs, but on the Mac there's a program called iPartition that allows you to repartition and even chance the disc file format without reformatting the drive. I used it to change a drive from HFS+ to GUID and kept every byte of data intact. Took ages, but impressive.

 

There must be an equivalent for PC out there somewhere.

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I'm trying to watch some divx files off my 4GB usb stick on my PS3. However the PS3 doesn't seem to find any files on the stick. The stick shows up in the menu. Yet when you advance to actually look in the stick there is nothing there. Anyone have any insight?

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I'm trying to watch some divx files off my 4GB usb stick on my PS3. However the PS3 doesn't seem to find any files on the stick. The stick shows up in the menu. Yet when you advance to actually look in the stick there is nothing there. Anyone have any insight?

 

Have you created a folder called video on it?

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