How to format external hdd to fat32 in windows 7

There is, however, a method to format these larger than 32gb up to 2TB drives within the Windows operating system without any additional software or applications. Following are the steps to do so. Free technical support is available for your desktops, laptops, printers, software usage and more, via our new community forum, where our tech support staff, or the Micro Center Community will be happy to answer your questions online.

Ask questions and get answers from our technical support team or our community. Helpful articles written by Micro Center Experts. To format the drive, you'll need to know which letter represents it on your PC. Double-click This PC in the left panel. Now look at the right panel under "Devices and drives.

Make note of the one assigned to your external drive. This opens the Windows Power User menu. Click Command Prompt Admin. This opens an administrator-level command prompt. If you see PowerShell Admin instead, click that. The commands will be the same whether you're using Command Prompt or PowerShell.

Type the format command at the prompt. You'll need to replace the "X" with the correct letter of your external drive. You'll see a message that says all of the data on the drive will be lost. This is required for formatting the drive. Windows will now format the drive as FAT Method 2. This method should work as long as your hard drive is smaller than 32 GB. Right-click the Windows menu and select File Explorer.

Double-click This PC. It's in the left panel. Right-click the external hard drive. It'll be in the right panel. A menu will expand. Click Format on the menu. This opens the "Format" dialog, which is a small window containing some formatting tools.

Select FAT32 from the "File system" menu. This option will only appear if the drive is smaller than 32 GB. Enter a name for the drive in "Volume label.

This is just how the drive shows up when connected to the computer. Check the box next to "Quick format. The only reason you might want to avoid using quick scan is if you're getting rid of the hard drive and worried that someone with amazing tech skills will be able to access your deleted data. Do as follow:. Generally speaking, you can successfully format your external hard drive via the above 2 methods.

However, they may let you down in some special situations:. When the external hard drive file system is damaged or corrupted for some reasons, you cannot format it, either. If the external hard drive is write-protected due to write protection switch, read-only attribute, wrong registry value, etc, you have to remove write protection from the drive before successfully formatting it. It can easily format a large hard drive 2TB at most to FAT32 file system, and reformat external hard drive with damaged file systems.

Step 1. Connect your external hard drive into your computer. Install it to your Windows based computer. Step 2. Launch this software. It will display you the basic situation of your hard drives. Select the external hard drive and right-click it. Choose "Format Partition" in the drop-down menu. Step 3.