Does anyone know how to format a large external hard drive to fat 32 in windows vista? Google turns up heaps of methods, but none of them seem to work.

Download a LiveCD of Linux, and use the partition editor, it'll let you do anything that's physically possible with fat32, without any of Microsoft's fake restrictions.

Ubuntu is the best and easiest, just boot into it and in the system menu under administration you'll find the partition editor. Will give you a nice user friendly environment like this to edit/create partitions:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/GParted.png

If you don't wanna download a full CD like Ubuntu, then download PartedMagic, which is smaller, but not as user friendly.

Thanks for the tip. I did try an old linux boot disk but I couldn't figure out what to do. I ended up using fat32format.exe.

None of the 'tricks' I found online for doing it in vista worked. It was really frustrating. People must post instructions for how to do something without checking whether it actually works. What made it worse is that vista will spend 3 hours on the job, then tell you it won't work.

Quote:

I did try an old linux boot disk but I couldn't figure out what to do

Old boot disks would probably drop you in a command line. New ones give you a full desktop, so it's just matter of selecting the partition editor from the menu.